History
list | QuAC_dialog_id
stringlengths 36
36
| Question
stringlengths 3
114
| Question_no
int64 1
12
| Rewrite
stringlengths 11
338
| true_page_title
stringlengths 3
42
| true_contexts
stringlengths 1.4k
9.79k
| answer
stringlengths 2
233
| true_contexts_wiki
stringlengths 0
145k
| extractive
bool 2
classes | retrieved_contexts
list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[
"Mumtaz Mahal",
"Mughal empress",
"What was special about the mughal empress?",
"Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men."
] |
C_2f7370ec972b4780b97dd3588c4f6d23_0
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 2 |
Are there any other interesting aspects about Mumtaz Mahal and the Mughal Empress other than what made the Mughal Empress special?
|
Mumtaz Mahal
|
Upon his accession to the throne in 1628, Shah Jahan designated Mumtaz as his chief empress with the title of 'Malika-i-Jahan' ("Queen of the World") and 'Malika-uz-Zamani' ("Queen of the Age"). Mumtaz's tenure as empress was brief (spanning a period of only three years due to her untimely death), nonetheless Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her. For example, no other empress' residence was as decorated as Khas Mahal (part of Agra Fort), where Mumtaz lived with Shah Jahan. It was decorated with pure gold and precious stones and had rose water fountains of its own. Each wife of the Mughal emperor was given regular monthly allowance for her gastos (housekeeping or travelling expenses). The highest allowance on record is 10 lakh rupees per year given to Mumtaz Mahal under Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan consulted Mumtaz in both private matters and the affairs of the state and she served as his close confidante and trusted adviser. At her intercession, he forgave enemies or commuted death sentences. His trust in her was so great that he gave her the highest honour of the land -- his imperial seal, the Mehr Uzaz, which validated imperial decrees. Mumtaz was portrayed as having no aspirations to political power, in contrast to her aunt, Empress Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, who had wielded considerable influence in the previous reign. A great influence on him, often intervening on behalf of the poor and destitute, she also enjoyed watching elephant and combat fights performed for the court. Mumtaz also patronized a number of poets, scholars and other talented persons. A noted Sanskrit poet, Vansidhara Mishra, was the Empress' favourite. On the recommendation of her principal lady-in-waiting, Sati-un-Nissa, Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men. It was quite common for women of noble birth to commission architecture in the Mughal Empire, so Mumtaz devoted some time to a riverside garden in Agra, which is now known as Zahara Bagh. It is the only architectural foundation which can be connected to her patronage. CANNOTANSWER
|
Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her.
|
Mumtaz Mahal (, ), born Arjumand Banu Begum (; 27 April 1593 – 17 June 1631) was the empress consort of the Mughal Empire from 19 January 1628 to 17 June 1631 as the chief consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The Taj Mahal in Agra, often cited as one of the Wonders of the World, was commissioned by her husband to act as her tomb.
Mumtaz Mahal was born Arjumand Banu Begum in Agra to a family of Persian nobility. She was the daughter of Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan, a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire, and the niece of Empress Nur Jahan, the chief wife of Emperor Jahangir and the power behind the emperor. She was married at the age of 19 on 10 May 1612 or 16 June 1612 to Prince Khurram, later known by his regnal name Shah Jahan, who conferred upon her the title "Mumtaz Mahal" (Persian: the exalted one of the palace). Although betrothed to Shah Jahan since 1607, she ultimately became his second wife in 1612. Mumtaz and her husband had 14 children, including Jahanara Begum (Shah Jahan's favourite daughter), and the Crown prince Dara Shikoh, the heir-apparent, anointed by his father, who temporarily succeeded him, until deposed by Mumtaz Mahal's sixth child, Aurangzeb, who ultimately succeeded his father as the sixth Mughal emperor in 1658.
Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631 in Burhanpur, Deccan (present-day Madhya Pradesh), during the birth of her 14th child, a daughter named Gauhar Ara Begum. Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal built as a tomb for her, which is considered to be a monument of undying love. As with other Mughal royal ladies, no contemporary likenesses of her are accepted, but numerous imagined portraits were created from the 19th century onwards. She is wrongly referred to as "Taj Bibi" which was the corrupted of her title Mumtaz and was in reality the title of her mother-in-law, Jagat Gosain.
Family and early life
Mumtaz Mahal was born as Arjumand Banu on 27 April 1593 in Agra to Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan and his wife Diwanji Begum, the daughter of a Persian noble, Khwaja Ghias-ud-din of Qazvin. Asaf Khan was a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire. His family had come to India impoverished in 1577, when his father Mirza Ghias Beg (popularly known by his title of I'timad-ud-Daulah), was taken into the service of Emperor Akbar in Agra.
Asaf Khan was also the older brother of Empress Nur Jahan, making Mumtaz a niece, and later, a step daughter-in-law of Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, Shah Jahan's father. Her older sister, Parwar Khanum, married Sheikh Farid, the son of Nawab Qutubuddin Koka, the governor of Badaun, who was also the emperor Jahangir's foster brother. Mumtaz also had a brother, Shaista Khan, who served as the governor of Bengal and various other provinces in the empire during Shah Jahan's reign.
Mumtaz was remarkable in the field of learning and was a talented and cultured lady. She was well-versed in Arabic and Persian languages and could compose poems in the latter. She was reputed to have a combination of modesty and candor, a woman warmly straightforward yet bemusedly self-possessed. Early in adolescence, she attracted the attention of important nobles of the realm. Jahangir must have heard about her, since he readily consented to Shah Jahan's engagement with her.
Marriage
Mumtaz Mahal was betrothed to Shah Jahan around 5 April 1607, when she was 14 years old at the time and he was 15. They were, however, married five years after the year of their betrothal on 10 May 1612 or 7 June 1612 in Agra. After their wedding celebrations, Shah Jahan, "finding her in appearance and character elect among all the women of the time", gave her the title "Mumtaz Mahal" Begum ("the Exalted One of the Palace"). During the intervening years between their betrothal and marriage, Shah Jahan had married his first wife, Princess Kandahari Begum in 1610 and in 1617, after marrying Mumtaz, took a third wife, Izz-un-Nissa Begum (titled Akbarabadi Mahal), the daughter of a prominent Mughal courtier. According to the official court historians, both the marriages were political alliances.
By all accounts, Shah Jahan was so taken with Mumtaz that he showed little interest in exercising his polygamous rights with his two other wives, other than dutifully siring a child with each. According to the official court chronicler, Motamid Khan, as recorded in his Iqbal Namah-e-Jahangiri, the relationship with his other wives "had nothing more than the status of marriage. The intimacy, deep affection, attention and favour which Shah Jahan had for Mumtaz exceeded what he felt for his other wives." Likewise, Shah Jahan's historian Inayat Khan commented that 'his whole delight was centered on this illustrious lady [Mumtaz], to such an extent that he did not feel towards the others [i.e. his other wives] one-thousandth part of the affection that he did for her.'
Mumtaz had a loving marriage with Shah Jahan. Even during her lifetime, poets would extol her beauty, grace, and compassion. Despite her frequent pregnancies, Mumtaz travelled with Shah Jahan's entourage throughout his earlier military campaigns and the subsequent rebellion against his father. She was his constant companion and trusted confidant, leading court historians to go to unheard lengths to document the intimate and erotic relationship the couple enjoyed. In their 19 years of marriage, they had 14 children together (eight sons and six daughters), seven of whom died at birth or at a very young age.
Mughal empress
Upon his accession to the throne in 1628 after subduing his half brother, Shahryar Mirza, Shah Jahan designated Mumtaz as his chief empress with the title of Padshah Begum '(Lady Emperor)', 'Malika-i-Jahan' ("Queen of the World") and 'Malika-uz-Zamani' ("Queen of the Age") and 'Malika-i-hindustan' ("Queen of the Hindustan"). Mumtaz's tenure as empress was brief, spanning a period of only three years due to her untimely death, nonetheless, Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her. She was also the only wife of Shah Jahan to be addressed as " Hazrat ". For example, no other empress' residence was as decorated as Khas Mahal (part of Agra Fort), where Mumtaz lived with Shah Jahan. It was decorated with pure gold and precious stones and had rose-water fountains of its own. Each wife of the Mughal emperor was given a regular monthly allowance for her gastos (housekeeping or travelling expenses); the highest such allowance on record is the one million rupees per year given to Mumtaz Mahal by Shah Jahan. Apart from this income, he gave her a lot of high-income lands and properties.
Shah Jahan consulted Mumtaz in both private matters and the affairs of the state, and she served as his close confidant and trusted adviser. Whenever an official sent matters or the people made a request, he first reported the matter to the Empress and made the decision with the knowledge of understanding and consultation with her. At her intercession, he forgave enemies or commuted death sentences. His trust in her was so great that he gave her the highest honour of the land – his imperial seal, the Mehr Uzaz, which validated imperial decrees. Mumtaz was portrayed as having no aspirations to political power, in contrast to her aunt, Empress Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, who had wielded considerable influence in the previous reign.
A uncontested and great influence on him, often intervening on behalf of the poor and destitute, she also enjoyed watching elephant and combat fights performed for the court. Mumtaz also patronized a number of poets, scholars and other talented persons. A noted Sanskrit poet, Vansidhara Mishra, was the Empress's favourite. On the recommendation of her principal lady-in-waiting, Sati-un-Nissa, Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men. It was quite common for women of noble birth to commission architecture in the Mughal Empire, so Mumtaz devoted some time to a riverside garden in Agra, which is now known as Zahara Bagh. It is the only architectural foundation which can be connected to her patronage.
Death and aftermath
Mumtaz Mahal died from postpartum hemorrhage in Burhanpur on 17 June 1631 while giving birth to her 14th child, after a prolonged labor around 30 hours. She had been accompanying her husband while he was fighting a campaign in the Deccan Plateau. Her body was temporarily buried at Burhanpur in a walled pleasure garden known as Zainabad originally constructed by Shah Jahan's uncle Daniyal on the bank of the Tapti River. The contemporary court chroniclers paid an unusual amount of attention to Mumtaz Mahal's death and Shah Jahan's grief at her demise. In the immediate aftermath of his bereavement, the emperor was reportedly inconsolable. Apparently, after her death, he went into secluded mourning for a year. When he appeared again, his hair had turned white, his back was bent, and his face worn. Mumtaz's eldest daughter, Jahanara Begum, gradually brought her father out of grief and took her mother's place at court.
Mumtaz Mahal's personal fortune (valued at 10 million rupees) was divided by Shah Jahan between Jahanara Begum, who received half, and the rest of her surviving children. Burhanpur was never intended by her husband as his wife's final resting spot. As a result, her body was disinterred in December 1631 and transported in a golden casket escorted by her son Shah Shuja, the deceased empress's head lady-in-waiting, and the distinguished courtier Wazir Khan, back to Agra. There, it was interred in a small building on the banks of the Yamuna River. Shah Jahan stayed behind in Burhanpur to conclude the military campaign that had originally brought him to the region. While there, he began planning the design and construction of a suitable mausoleum and funerary garden in Agra for his wife. It was a task that would take 22 years to complete, the Taj Mahal.
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal was commissioned by Shah Jahan to be built as a mausoleum for Mumtaz Mahal. It is seen as an embodiment of undying love and marital devotion. English poet Sir Edwin Arnold describes it as "Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passion of an emperor's love wrought in living stones." The beauty of the monument is also taken as a representation of Mumtaz Mahal's beauty and this association leads many to describe the Taj Mahal as feminine. Since Muslim tradition forbids elaborate decorations on graves, the bodies of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan are placed in a relatively plain crypt beneath the inner chamber with their faces turned to the right and towards Mecca.
The Ninety Nine Names of God are found as calligraphic inscriptions on the sides of the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal in the crypt including, "O Noble, O Magnificent, O Majestic, O Unique, O Eternal, O Glorious…". There are many theories about the origin of the name of this tomb and one of them suggests that 'Taj' is an abbreviation of the name Mumtaz. European travelers, such as François Bernier, who observed its construction, were among the first to call it the Taj Mahal. Since they are unlikely to have come up with the name, they might have picked it up from the locals of Agra who called the Empress 'Taj Mahal' and thought the tomb was named after her and the name began to be used interchangeably, but no firm evidence suggests this. Shah Jahan had not intended to entomb another person in the Taj Mahal; however, Aurangzeb had Shah Jahan buried next to the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal rather than build a separate tomb for his father. This is evident from the asymmetrical placement of Shah Jahan's grave on one side of his wife's grave which is in the centre.
In popular culture
Astronomy
A crater was named in her honour on asteroid 433 Eros, along with another one after her husband.
A crater on the planet Venus is named after her.
Literature
A cat named after Mumtaz Mahal ("Princess Arjumand") plays a major role in Connie Willis's 1997 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Arjumand Banu (Mumtaz Mahal) is a principal character in Indu Sundaresan's novel The Feast of Roses (2003) and its sequel, Shadow Princess (2010), begins with her death.
Mumtaz Mahal is a main character in Sonja Chandrachud's novel Trouble at the Taj (2011). She appears in the book as a ghost.
In John Shors' novel Beneath a Marble Sky (2013), Mahal's daughter, Princess Jahanara, tells the extraordinary story of how the Taj Mahal came to be, describing her own life as an agent in its creation and as a witness to the fateful events surrounding its completion.
Films
Mumtaz Mahal is a 1926 Indian silent film by Homi Master.
Actress Enakshi Rama Rau played the role of Mumtaz Mahal in Shiraz (1928).
Mumtaz Mahal, a 1944 Indian film was based on her life.
Actress Suraiya played the role of young Mumtaz Mahal in Nanubhai Vakil's film Taj Mahal (1941).
Mumtaz Mahal was portrayed by actress Nasreen in Abdul Rashid Kardar's film Shahjehan (1946).
Mumtaz Mahal is a 1957 Indian Hindi-language drama film by Ram Daryani, starring Veena in the titular role.
Bina Rai portrayed Mumtaz Mahal in M. Sadiq's film Taj Mahal (1963).
Shahzadi Mumtaz, an Indian film starring Asokan and Shakuntala released in 1977.
Purnima Patwardhan portrayed her role in the 2003 Indian historical drama film, Taj Mahal: A Monument of Love.
Sonya Jehan portrayed Mumtaz Mahal in Akbar Khan's film Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story (2005).
Other
Mumtaz Mahal was the inspiration behind the popular Guerlain perfume Shalimar (1921).
Issue
Ancestry
References
Bibliography
External links
Mumtaz Mahal
1593 births
1631 deaths
Deaths in childbirth
Indian Shia Muslims
People from Agra
Taj Mahal
16th-century Indian women
16th-century Indian people
17th-century Indian women
17th-century Indian people
16th-century Iranian people
17th-century Iranian people
Indian people of Iranian descent
Wives of Shah Jahan
| true |
[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Mumtaz Mahal",
"Mughal empress",
"What was special about the mughal empress?",
"Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her."
] |
C_2f7370ec972b4780b97dd3588c4f6d23_0
|
did they marry?
| 3 |
Did Mumtaz Mahal and Mughal empress marry?
|
Mumtaz Mahal
|
Upon his accession to the throne in 1628, Shah Jahan designated Mumtaz as his chief empress with the title of 'Malika-i-Jahan' ("Queen of the World") and 'Malika-uz-Zamani' ("Queen of the Age"). Mumtaz's tenure as empress was brief (spanning a period of only three years due to her untimely death), nonetheless Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her. For example, no other empress' residence was as decorated as Khas Mahal (part of Agra Fort), where Mumtaz lived with Shah Jahan. It was decorated with pure gold and precious stones and had rose water fountains of its own. Each wife of the Mughal emperor was given regular monthly allowance for her gastos (housekeeping or travelling expenses). The highest allowance on record is 10 lakh rupees per year given to Mumtaz Mahal under Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan consulted Mumtaz in both private matters and the affairs of the state and she served as his close confidante and trusted adviser. At her intercession, he forgave enemies or commuted death sentences. His trust in her was so great that he gave her the highest honour of the land -- his imperial seal, the Mehr Uzaz, which validated imperial decrees. Mumtaz was portrayed as having no aspirations to political power, in contrast to her aunt, Empress Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, who had wielded considerable influence in the previous reign. A great influence on him, often intervening on behalf of the poor and destitute, she also enjoyed watching elephant and combat fights performed for the court. Mumtaz also patronized a number of poets, scholars and other talented persons. A noted Sanskrit poet, Vansidhara Mishra, was the Empress' favourite. On the recommendation of her principal lady-in-waiting, Sati-un-Nissa, Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men. It was quite common for women of noble birth to commission architecture in the Mughal Empire, so Mumtaz devoted some time to a riverside garden in Agra, which is now known as Zahara Bagh. It is the only architectural foundation which can be connected to her patronage. CANNOTANSWER
|
Each wife of the Mughal emperor
|
Mumtaz Mahal (, ), born Arjumand Banu Begum (; 27 April 1593 – 17 June 1631) was the empress consort of the Mughal Empire from 19 January 1628 to 17 June 1631 as the chief consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The Taj Mahal in Agra, often cited as one of the Wonders of the World, was commissioned by her husband to act as her tomb.
Mumtaz Mahal was born Arjumand Banu Begum in Agra to a family of Persian nobility. She was the daughter of Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan, a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire, and the niece of Empress Nur Jahan, the chief wife of Emperor Jahangir and the power behind the emperor. She was married at the age of 19 on 10 May 1612 or 16 June 1612 to Prince Khurram, later known by his regnal name Shah Jahan, who conferred upon her the title "Mumtaz Mahal" (Persian: the exalted one of the palace). Although betrothed to Shah Jahan since 1607, she ultimately became his second wife in 1612. Mumtaz and her husband had 14 children, including Jahanara Begum (Shah Jahan's favourite daughter), and the Crown prince Dara Shikoh, the heir-apparent, anointed by his father, who temporarily succeeded him, until deposed by Mumtaz Mahal's sixth child, Aurangzeb, who ultimately succeeded his father as the sixth Mughal emperor in 1658.
Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631 in Burhanpur, Deccan (present-day Madhya Pradesh), during the birth of her 14th child, a daughter named Gauhar Ara Begum. Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal built as a tomb for her, which is considered to be a monument of undying love. As with other Mughal royal ladies, no contemporary likenesses of her are accepted, but numerous imagined portraits were created from the 19th century onwards. She is wrongly referred to as "Taj Bibi" which was the corrupted of her title Mumtaz and was in reality the title of her mother-in-law, Jagat Gosain.
Family and early life
Mumtaz Mahal was born as Arjumand Banu on 27 April 1593 in Agra to Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan and his wife Diwanji Begum, the daughter of a Persian noble, Khwaja Ghias-ud-din of Qazvin. Asaf Khan was a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire. His family had come to India impoverished in 1577, when his father Mirza Ghias Beg (popularly known by his title of I'timad-ud-Daulah), was taken into the service of Emperor Akbar in Agra.
Asaf Khan was also the older brother of Empress Nur Jahan, making Mumtaz a niece, and later, a step daughter-in-law of Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, Shah Jahan's father. Her older sister, Parwar Khanum, married Sheikh Farid, the son of Nawab Qutubuddin Koka, the governor of Badaun, who was also the emperor Jahangir's foster brother. Mumtaz also had a brother, Shaista Khan, who served as the governor of Bengal and various other provinces in the empire during Shah Jahan's reign.
Mumtaz was remarkable in the field of learning and was a talented and cultured lady. She was well-versed in Arabic and Persian languages and could compose poems in the latter. She was reputed to have a combination of modesty and candor, a woman warmly straightforward yet bemusedly self-possessed. Early in adolescence, she attracted the attention of important nobles of the realm. Jahangir must have heard about her, since he readily consented to Shah Jahan's engagement with her.
Marriage
Mumtaz Mahal was betrothed to Shah Jahan around 5 April 1607, when she was 14 years old at the time and he was 15. They were, however, married five years after the year of their betrothal on 10 May 1612 or 7 June 1612 in Agra. After their wedding celebrations, Shah Jahan, "finding her in appearance and character elect among all the women of the time", gave her the title "Mumtaz Mahal" Begum ("the Exalted One of the Palace"). During the intervening years between their betrothal and marriage, Shah Jahan had married his first wife, Princess Kandahari Begum in 1610 and in 1617, after marrying Mumtaz, took a third wife, Izz-un-Nissa Begum (titled Akbarabadi Mahal), the daughter of a prominent Mughal courtier. According to the official court historians, both the marriages were political alliances.
By all accounts, Shah Jahan was so taken with Mumtaz that he showed little interest in exercising his polygamous rights with his two other wives, other than dutifully siring a child with each. According to the official court chronicler, Motamid Khan, as recorded in his Iqbal Namah-e-Jahangiri, the relationship with his other wives "had nothing more than the status of marriage. The intimacy, deep affection, attention and favour which Shah Jahan had for Mumtaz exceeded what he felt for his other wives." Likewise, Shah Jahan's historian Inayat Khan commented that 'his whole delight was centered on this illustrious lady [Mumtaz], to such an extent that he did not feel towards the others [i.e. his other wives] one-thousandth part of the affection that he did for her.'
Mumtaz had a loving marriage with Shah Jahan. Even during her lifetime, poets would extol her beauty, grace, and compassion. Despite her frequent pregnancies, Mumtaz travelled with Shah Jahan's entourage throughout his earlier military campaigns and the subsequent rebellion against his father. She was his constant companion and trusted confidant, leading court historians to go to unheard lengths to document the intimate and erotic relationship the couple enjoyed. In their 19 years of marriage, they had 14 children together (eight sons and six daughters), seven of whom died at birth or at a very young age.
Mughal empress
Upon his accession to the throne in 1628 after subduing his half brother, Shahryar Mirza, Shah Jahan designated Mumtaz as his chief empress with the title of Padshah Begum '(Lady Emperor)', 'Malika-i-Jahan' ("Queen of the World") and 'Malika-uz-Zamani' ("Queen of the Age") and 'Malika-i-hindustan' ("Queen of the Hindustan"). Mumtaz's tenure as empress was brief, spanning a period of only three years due to her untimely death, nonetheless, Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her. She was also the only wife of Shah Jahan to be addressed as " Hazrat ". For example, no other empress' residence was as decorated as Khas Mahal (part of Agra Fort), where Mumtaz lived with Shah Jahan. It was decorated with pure gold and precious stones and had rose-water fountains of its own. Each wife of the Mughal emperor was given a regular monthly allowance for her gastos (housekeeping or travelling expenses); the highest such allowance on record is the one million rupees per year given to Mumtaz Mahal by Shah Jahan. Apart from this income, he gave her a lot of high-income lands and properties.
Shah Jahan consulted Mumtaz in both private matters and the affairs of the state, and she served as his close confidant and trusted adviser. Whenever an official sent matters or the people made a request, he first reported the matter to the Empress and made the decision with the knowledge of understanding and consultation with her. At her intercession, he forgave enemies or commuted death sentences. His trust in her was so great that he gave her the highest honour of the land – his imperial seal, the Mehr Uzaz, which validated imperial decrees. Mumtaz was portrayed as having no aspirations to political power, in contrast to her aunt, Empress Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, who had wielded considerable influence in the previous reign.
A uncontested and great influence on him, often intervening on behalf of the poor and destitute, she also enjoyed watching elephant and combat fights performed for the court. Mumtaz also patronized a number of poets, scholars and other talented persons. A noted Sanskrit poet, Vansidhara Mishra, was the Empress's favourite. On the recommendation of her principal lady-in-waiting, Sati-un-Nissa, Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men. It was quite common for women of noble birth to commission architecture in the Mughal Empire, so Mumtaz devoted some time to a riverside garden in Agra, which is now known as Zahara Bagh. It is the only architectural foundation which can be connected to her patronage.
Death and aftermath
Mumtaz Mahal died from postpartum hemorrhage in Burhanpur on 17 June 1631 while giving birth to her 14th child, after a prolonged labor around 30 hours. She had been accompanying her husband while he was fighting a campaign in the Deccan Plateau. Her body was temporarily buried at Burhanpur in a walled pleasure garden known as Zainabad originally constructed by Shah Jahan's uncle Daniyal on the bank of the Tapti River. The contemporary court chroniclers paid an unusual amount of attention to Mumtaz Mahal's death and Shah Jahan's grief at her demise. In the immediate aftermath of his bereavement, the emperor was reportedly inconsolable. Apparently, after her death, he went into secluded mourning for a year. When he appeared again, his hair had turned white, his back was bent, and his face worn. Mumtaz's eldest daughter, Jahanara Begum, gradually brought her father out of grief and took her mother's place at court.
Mumtaz Mahal's personal fortune (valued at 10 million rupees) was divided by Shah Jahan between Jahanara Begum, who received half, and the rest of her surviving children. Burhanpur was never intended by her husband as his wife's final resting spot. As a result, her body was disinterred in December 1631 and transported in a golden casket escorted by her son Shah Shuja, the deceased empress's head lady-in-waiting, and the distinguished courtier Wazir Khan, back to Agra. There, it was interred in a small building on the banks of the Yamuna River. Shah Jahan stayed behind in Burhanpur to conclude the military campaign that had originally brought him to the region. While there, he began planning the design and construction of a suitable mausoleum and funerary garden in Agra for his wife. It was a task that would take 22 years to complete, the Taj Mahal.
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal was commissioned by Shah Jahan to be built as a mausoleum for Mumtaz Mahal. It is seen as an embodiment of undying love and marital devotion. English poet Sir Edwin Arnold describes it as "Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passion of an emperor's love wrought in living stones." The beauty of the monument is also taken as a representation of Mumtaz Mahal's beauty and this association leads many to describe the Taj Mahal as feminine. Since Muslim tradition forbids elaborate decorations on graves, the bodies of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan are placed in a relatively plain crypt beneath the inner chamber with their faces turned to the right and towards Mecca.
The Ninety Nine Names of God are found as calligraphic inscriptions on the sides of the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal in the crypt including, "O Noble, O Magnificent, O Majestic, O Unique, O Eternal, O Glorious…". There are many theories about the origin of the name of this tomb and one of them suggests that 'Taj' is an abbreviation of the name Mumtaz. European travelers, such as François Bernier, who observed its construction, were among the first to call it the Taj Mahal. Since they are unlikely to have come up with the name, they might have picked it up from the locals of Agra who called the Empress 'Taj Mahal' and thought the tomb was named after her and the name began to be used interchangeably, but no firm evidence suggests this. Shah Jahan had not intended to entomb another person in the Taj Mahal; however, Aurangzeb had Shah Jahan buried next to the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal rather than build a separate tomb for his father. This is evident from the asymmetrical placement of Shah Jahan's grave on one side of his wife's grave which is in the centre.
In popular culture
Astronomy
A crater was named in her honour on asteroid 433 Eros, along with another one after her husband.
A crater on the planet Venus is named after her.
Literature
A cat named after Mumtaz Mahal ("Princess Arjumand") plays a major role in Connie Willis's 1997 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Arjumand Banu (Mumtaz Mahal) is a principal character in Indu Sundaresan's novel The Feast of Roses (2003) and its sequel, Shadow Princess (2010), begins with her death.
Mumtaz Mahal is a main character in Sonja Chandrachud's novel Trouble at the Taj (2011). She appears in the book as a ghost.
In John Shors' novel Beneath a Marble Sky (2013), Mahal's daughter, Princess Jahanara, tells the extraordinary story of how the Taj Mahal came to be, describing her own life as an agent in its creation and as a witness to the fateful events surrounding its completion.
Films
Mumtaz Mahal is a 1926 Indian silent film by Homi Master.
Actress Enakshi Rama Rau played the role of Mumtaz Mahal in Shiraz (1928).
Mumtaz Mahal, a 1944 Indian film was based on her life.
Actress Suraiya played the role of young Mumtaz Mahal in Nanubhai Vakil's film Taj Mahal (1941).
Mumtaz Mahal was portrayed by actress Nasreen in Abdul Rashid Kardar's film Shahjehan (1946).
Mumtaz Mahal is a 1957 Indian Hindi-language drama film by Ram Daryani, starring Veena in the titular role.
Bina Rai portrayed Mumtaz Mahal in M. Sadiq's film Taj Mahal (1963).
Shahzadi Mumtaz, an Indian film starring Asokan and Shakuntala released in 1977.
Purnima Patwardhan portrayed her role in the 2003 Indian historical drama film, Taj Mahal: A Monument of Love.
Sonya Jehan portrayed Mumtaz Mahal in Akbar Khan's film Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story (2005).
Other
Mumtaz Mahal was the inspiration behind the popular Guerlain perfume Shalimar (1921).
Issue
Ancestry
References
Bibliography
External links
Mumtaz Mahal
1593 births
1631 deaths
Deaths in childbirth
Indian Shia Muslims
People from Agra
Taj Mahal
16th-century Indian women
16th-century Indian people
17th-century Indian women
17th-century Indian people
16th-century Iranian people
17th-century Iranian people
Indian people of Iranian descent
Wives of Shah Jahan
| true |
[
"The Husband of the Rat's Daughter is a Japanese fairy tale. Andrew Lang included it in The Brown Fairy Book. It is Aarne-Thompson type 2031C, a chain tale or cumulative tale. Another story of this type is The Mouse Turned into a Maid.\n\nSynopsis\n\nTwo rats had a remarkably beautiful daughter. In some variants, the father would have been happy to marry her to a rat of finer family, but the mother did not want her daughter to marry a mere rat; in others, they both agreed that she must marry the greatest being in the world. They offered her to the sun, telling him they wanted a son-in-law who was greater than all. The sun told them that he could not take advantage of their ignorance: the cloud, which blotted out his face, was greater. So they asked the cloud instead. The cloud told them that the wind freely blew it about. They asked the wind. The wind told them that the wall could easily stop it. They asked the wall. The wall told them that a rat could reduce it to powder with its teeth. So they married her to a rat.\n\nSee also\n\nThe Stonecutter\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nThe Husband of the Rat's Daughter\n\"The Mouse Who Was to Marry the Sun: fables of Aarne-Thompson type 2031C -- variants\n\nJapanese fairy tales\nFictional mice and rats\nAnimal tales\nWorks about marriage",
"I Told You So is a 1970 Ghanaian movie. The movie portrays Ghanaians and their way of life in a satirical style. It also gives insight into the life of a young lady who did not take the advice of her father when about to marry a man, she did not know anything about the man she was going to marry, but rather took her mother's and uncle's advice because of the wealth and power the man has.\n\nThe young lady later finds out that the man she is supposed to marry was an armed robber. She was unhappy of the whole incident. When her dad ask what had happened, she replied that the man she was supposed to marry is an armed robber; her father ended by saying \"I told you so\".\n\nCast\nBobe Cole\nMargret Quainoo (Araba Stamp)\nKweku Crankson (Osuo Abrobor)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n I TOLD YOU SO GHANAIAN MOVIE\n\n1970 films\nGhanaian films"
] |
[
"Mumtaz Mahal",
"Mughal empress",
"What was special about the mughal empress?",
"Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her.",
"did they marry?",
"Each wife of the Mughal emperor"
] |
C_2f7370ec972b4780b97dd3588c4f6d23_0
|
did they have any children?
| 4 |
Did Mumtaz Mahal and Mughal empress have any children?
|
Mumtaz Mahal
|
Upon his accession to the throne in 1628, Shah Jahan designated Mumtaz as his chief empress with the title of 'Malika-i-Jahan' ("Queen of the World") and 'Malika-uz-Zamani' ("Queen of the Age"). Mumtaz's tenure as empress was brief (spanning a period of only three years due to her untimely death), nonetheless Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her. For example, no other empress' residence was as decorated as Khas Mahal (part of Agra Fort), where Mumtaz lived with Shah Jahan. It was decorated with pure gold and precious stones and had rose water fountains of its own. Each wife of the Mughal emperor was given regular monthly allowance for her gastos (housekeeping or travelling expenses). The highest allowance on record is 10 lakh rupees per year given to Mumtaz Mahal under Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan consulted Mumtaz in both private matters and the affairs of the state and she served as his close confidante and trusted adviser. At her intercession, he forgave enemies or commuted death sentences. His trust in her was so great that he gave her the highest honour of the land -- his imperial seal, the Mehr Uzaz, which validated imperial decrees. Mumtaz was portrayed as having no aspirations to political power, in contrast to her aunt, Empress Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, who had wielded considerable influence in the previous reign. A great influence on him, often intervening on behalf of the poor and destitute, she also enjoyed watching elephant and combat fights performed for the court. Mumtaz also patronized a number of poets, scholars and other talented persons. A noted Sanskrit poet, Vansidhara Mishra, was the Empress' favourite. On the recommendation of her principal lady-in-waiting, Sati-un-Nissa, Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men. It was quite common for women of noble birth to commission architecture in the Mughal Empire, so Mumtaz devoted some time to a riverside garden in Agra, which is now known as Zahara Bagh. It is the only architectural foundation which can be connected to her patronage. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Mumtaz Mahal (, ), born Arjumand Banu Begum (; 27 April 1593 – 17 June 1631) was the empress consort of the Mughal Empire from 19 January 1628 to 17 June 1631 as the chief consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The Taj Mahal in Agra, often cited as one of the Wonders of the World, was commissioned by her husband to act as her tomb.
Mumtaz Mahal was born Arjumand Banu Begum in Agra to a family of Persian nobility. She was the daughter of Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan, a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire, and the niece of Empress Nur Jahan, the chief wife of Emperor Jahangir and the power behind the emperor. She was married at the age of 19 on 10 May 1612 or 16 June 1612 to Prince Khurram, later known by his regnal name Shah Jahan, who conferred upon her the title "Mumtaz Mahal" (Persian: the exalted one of the palace). Although betrothed to Shah Jahan since 1607, she ultimately became his second wife in 1612. Mumtaz and her husband had 14 children, including Jahanara Begum (Shah Jahan's favourite daughter), and the Crown prince Dara Shikoh, the heir-apparent, anointed by his father, who temporarily succeeded him, until deposed by Mumtaz Mahal's sixth child, Aurangzeb, who ultimately succeeded his father as the sixth Mughal emperor in 1658.
Mumtaz Mahal died in 1631 in Burhanpur, Deccan (present-day Madhya Pradesh), during the birth of her 14th child, a daughter named Gauhar Ara Begum. Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal built as a tomb for her, which is considered to be a monument of undying love. As with other Mughal royal ladies, no contemporary likenesses of her are accepted, but numerous imagined portraits were created from the 19th century onwards. She is wrongly referred to as "Taj Bibi" which was the corrupted of her title Mumtaz and was in reality the title of her mother-in-law, Jagat Gosain.
Family and early life
Mumtaz Mahal was born as Arjumand Banu on 27 April 1593 in Agra to Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan and his wife Diwanji Begum, the daughter of a Persian noble, Khwaja Ghias-ud-din of Qazvin. Asaf Khan was a wealthy Persian noble who held high office in the Mughal Empire. His family had come to India impoverished in 1577, when his father Mirza Ghias Beg (popularly known by his title of I'timad-ud-Daulah), was taken into the service of Emperor Akbar in Agra.
Asaf Khan was also the older brother of Empress Nur Jahan, making Mumtaz a niece, and later, a step daughter-in-law of Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, Shah Jahan's father. Her older sister, Parwar Khanum, married Sheikh Farid, the son of Nawab Qutubuddin Koka, the governor of Badaun, who was also the emperor Jahangir's foster brother. Mumtaz also had a brother, Shaista Khan, who served as the governor of Bengal and various other provinces in the empire during Shah Jahan's reign.
Mumtaz was remarkable in the field of learning and was a talented and cultured lady. She was well-versed in Arabic and Persian languages and could compose poems in the latter. She was reputed to have a combination of modesty and candor, a woman warmly straightforward yet bemusedly self-possessed. Early in adolescence, she attracted the attention of important nobles of the realm. Jahangir must have heard about her, since he readily consented to Shah Jahan's engagement with her.
Marriage
Mumtaz Mahal was betrothed to Shah Jahan around 5 April 1607, when she was 14 years old at the time and he was 15. They were, however, married five years after the year of their betrothal on 10 May 1612 or 7 June 1612 in Agra. After their wedding celebrations, Shah Jahan, "finding her in appearance and character elect among all the women of the time", gave her the title "Mumtaz Mahal" Begum ("the Exalted One of the Palace"). During the intervening years between their betrothal and marriage, Shah Jahan had married his first wife, Princess Kandahari Begum in 1610 and in 1617, after marrying Mumtaz, took a third wife, Izz-un-Nissa Begum (titled Akbarabadi Mahal), the daughter of a prominent Mughal courtier. According to the official court historians, both the marriages were political alliances.
By all accounts, Shah Jahan was so taken with Mumtaz that he showed little interest in exercising his polygamous rights with his two other wives, other than dutifully siring a child with each. According to the official court chronicler, Motamid Khan, as recorded in his Iqbal Namah-e-Jahangiri, the relationship with his other wives "had nothing more than the status of marriage. The intimacy, deep affection, attention and favour which Shah Jahan had for Mumtaz exceeded what he felt for his other wives." Likewise, Shah Jahan's historian Inayat Khan commented that 'his whole delight was centered on this illustrious lady [Mumtaz], to such an extent that he did not feel towards the others [i.e. his other wives] one-thousandth part of the affection that he did for her.'
Mumtaz had a loving marriage with Shah Jahan. Even during her lifetime, poets would extol her beauty, grace, and compassion. Despite her frequent pregnancies, Mumtaz travelled with Shah Jahan's entourage throughout his earlier military campaigns and the subsequent rebellion against his father. She was his constant companion and trusted confidant, leading court historians to go to unheard lengths to document the intimate and erotic relationship the couple enjoyed. In their 19 years of marriage, they had 14 children together (eight sons and six daughters), seven of whom died at birth or at a very young age.
Mughal empress
Upon his accession to the throne in 1628 after subduing his half brother, Shahryar Mirza, Shah Jahan designated Mumtaz as his chief empress with the title of Padshah Begum '(Lady Emperor)', 'Malika-i-Jahan' ("Queen of the World") and 'Malika-uz-Zamani' ("Queen of the Age") and 'Malika-i-hindustan' ("Queen of the Hindustan"). Mumtaz's tenure as empress was brief, spanning a period of only three years due to her untimely death, nonetheless, Shah Jahan bestowed her with luxuries that no other empress was given before her. She was also the only wife of Shah Jahan to be addressed as " Hazrat ". For example, no other empress' residence was as decorated as Khas Mahal (part of Agra Fort), where Mumtaz lived with Shah Jahan. It was decorated with pure gold and precious stones and had rose-water fountains of its own. Each wife of the Mughal emperor was given a regular monthly allowance for her gastos (housekeeping or travelling expenses); the highest such allowance on record is the one million rupees per year given to Mumtaz Mahal by Shah Jahan. Apart from this income, he gave her a lot of high-income lands and properties.
Shah Jahan consulted Mumtaz in both private matters and the affairs of the state, and she served as his close confidant and trusted adviser. Whenever an official sent matters or the people made a request, he first reported the matter to the Empress and made the decision with the knowledge of understanding and consultation with her. At her intercession, he forgave enemies or commuted death sentences. His trust in her was so great that he gave her the highest honour of the land – his imperial seal, the Mehr Uzaz, which validated imperial decrees. Mumtaz was portrayed as having no aspirations to political power, in contrast to her aunt, Empress Nur Jahan, the chief consort of Emperor Jahangir, who had wielded considerable influence in the previous reign.
A uncontested and great influence on him, often intervening on behalf of the poor and destitute, she also enjoyed watching elephant and combat fights performed for the court. Mumtaz also patronized a number of poets, scholars and other talented persons. A noted Sanskrit poet, Vansidhara Mishra, was the Empress's favourite. On the recommendation of her principal lady-in-waiting, Sati-un-Nissa, Mumtaz Mahal provided pensions and donations to the daughters of poor scholars, theologians, and pious men. It was quite common for women of noble birth to commission architecture in the Mughal Empire, so Mumtaz devoted some time to a riverside garden in Agra, which is now known as Zahara Bagh. It is the only architectural foundation which can be connected to her patronage.
Death and aftermath
Mumtaz Mahal died from postpartum hemorrhage in Burhanpur on 17 June 1631 while giving birth to her 14th child, after a prolonged labor around 30 hours. She had been accompanying her husband while he was fighting a campaign in the Deccan Plateau. Her body was temporarily buried at Burhanpur in a walled pleasure garden known as Zainabad originally constructed by Shah Jahan's uncle Daniyal on the bank of the Tapti River. The contemporary court chroniclers paid an unusual amount of attention to Mumtaz Mahal's death and Shah Jahan's grief at her demise. In the immediate aftermath of his bereavement, the emperor was reportedly inconsolable. Apparently, after her death, he went into secluded mourning for a year. When he appeared again, his hair had turned white, his back was bent, and his face worn. Mumtaz's eldest daughter, Jahanara Begum, gradually brought her father out of grief and took her mother's place at court.
Mumtaz Mahal's personal fortune (valued at 10 million rupees) was divided by Shah Jahan between Jahanara Begum, who received half, and the rest of her surviving children. Burhanpur was never intended by her husband as his wife's final resting spot. As a result, her body was disinterred in December 1631 and transported in a golden casket escorted by her son Shah Shuja, the deceased empress's head lady-in-waiting, and the distinguished courtier Wazir Khan, back to Agra. There, it was interred in a small building on the banks of the Yamuna River. Shah Jahan stayed behind in Burhanpur to conclude the military campaign that had originally brought him to the region. While there, he began planning the design and construction of a suitable mausoleum and funerary garden in Agra for his wife. It was a task that would take 22 years to complete, the Taj Mahal.
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal was commissioned by Shah Jahan to be built as a mausoleum for Mumtaz Mahal. It is seen as an embodiment of undying love and marital devotion. English poet Sir Edwin Arnold describes it as "Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passion of an emperor's love wrought in living stones." The beauty of the monument is also taken as a representation of Mumtaz Mahal's beauty and this association leads many to describe the Taj Mahal as feminine. Since Muslim tradition forbids elaborate decorations on graves, the bodies of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan are placed in a relatively plain crypt beneath the inner chamber with their faces turned to the right and towards Mecca.
The Ninety Nine Names of God are found as calligraphic inscriptions on the sides of the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal in the crypt including, "O Noble, O Magnificent, O Majestic, O Unique, O Eternal, O Glorious…". There are many theories about the origin of the name of this tomb and one of them suggests that 'Taj' is an abbreviation of the name Mumtaz. European travelers, such as François Bernier, who observed its construction, were among the first to call it the Taj Mahal. Since they are unlikely to have come up with the name, they might have picked it up from the locals of Agra who called the Empress 'Taj Mahal' and thought the tomb was named after her and the name began to be used interchangeably, but no firm evidence suggests this. Shah Jahan had not intended to entomb another person in the Taj Mahal; however, Aurangzeb had Shah Jahan buried next to the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal rather than build a separate tomb for his father. This is evident from the asymmetrical placement of Shah Jahan's grave on one side of his wife's grave which is in the centre.
In popular culture
Astronomy
A crater was named in her honour on asteroid 433 Eros, along with another one after her husband.
A crater on the planet Venus is named after her.
Literature
A cat named after Mumtaz Mahal ("Princess Arjumand") plays a major role in Connie Willis's 1997 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Arjumand Banu (Mumtaz Mahal) is a principal character in Indu Sundaresan's novel The Feast of Roses (2003) and its sequel, Shadow Princess (2010), begins with her death.
Mumtaz Mahal is a main character in Sonja Chandrachud's novel Trouble at the Taj (2011). She appears in the book as a ghost.
In John Shors' novel Beneath a Marble Sky (2013), Mahal's daughter, Princess Jahanara, tells the extraordinary story of how the Taj Mahal came to be, describing her own life as an agent in its creation and as a witness to the fateful events surrounding its completion.
Films
Mumtaz Mahal is a 1926 Indian silent film by Homi Master.
Actress Enakshi Rama Rau played the role of Mumtaz Mahal in Shiraz (1928).
Mumtaz Mahal, a 1944 Indian film was based on her life.
Actress Suraiya played the role of young Mumtaz Mahal in Nanubhai Vakil's film Taj Mahal (1941).
Mumtaz Mahal was portrayed by actress Nasreen in Abdul Rashid Kardar's film Shahjehan (1946).
Mumtaz Mahal is a 1957 Indian Hindi-language drama film by Ram Daryani, starring Veena in the titular role.
Bina Rai portrayed Mumtaz Mahal in M. Sadiq's film Taj Mahal (1963).
Shahzadi Mumtaz, an Indian film starring Asokan and Shakuntala released in 1977.
Purnima Patwardhan portrayed her role in the 2003 Indian historical drama film, Taj Mahal: A Monument of Love.
Sonya Jehan portrayed Mumtaz Mahal in Akbar Khan's film Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story (2005).
Other
Mumtaz Mahal was the inspiration behind the popular Guerlain perfume Shalimar (1921).
Issue
Ancestry
References
Bibliography
External links
Mumtaz Mahal
1593 births
1631 deaths
Deaths in childbirth
Indian Shia Muslims
People from Agra
Taj Mahal
16th-century Indian women
16th-century Indian people
17th-century Indian women
17th-century Indian people
16th-century Iranian people
17th-century Iranian people
Indian people of Iranian descent
Wives of Shah Jahan
| false |
[
"Else Hansen (Cathrine Marie Mahs Hansen) also called de Hansen (1720 – 4 September 1784), was the royal mistress of king Frederick V of Denmark. She is his most famous mistress and known in history as Madam Hansen, and was, alongside Charlotte Amalie Winge, one of only two women known to have been long term lovers of the king.\n\nLife\n\nThe background of Else Hansen does not appear to be known. Tradition claims her to be the sister of Frederick's chamber servant Henrik Vilhelm Tillisch, who in 1743 reportedly smuggled in his sister to the king at night, but modern research does not support them to be the same person.\n\nRoyal mistress\nIt is not known exactly when and how Hansen became the lover of the king. Frederick V was known for his debauched life style. According to Dorothea Biehl, the king was known to participate in orgies or 'Bacchus parties', in which he drank alcohol with his male friends while watching female prostitutes stripped naked and danced, after which the king would sometime beat them with his stick and whip them after having been intoxicated by alcohol. These women where economically compensated, but none of them seem to have had any status of a long term mistress, nor did any of the noblewomen and maids-of-honors, which according to rumors where offered to the king by their families in hope of advantages but simply married of as soon as they became pregnant without any potential relationship having been anything but a secret. The relationship between the king and Else Hansen was therefore uncommon.\n\nElse Hansen gave birth to five children with the king between 1746 and 1751, which is why the affair is presumed to have started in 1746 at the latest and ended in 1751 at the earliest. At least her three younger children where all born at the manor Ulriksholm on Funen, a manor owned by Ulrik Frederik von Heinen, brother-in-law of the de facto ruler of Denmark, the kings favorite Adam Gottlob Moltke, who likely arranged the matter. The manor was named after the royal Ulrik Christian Gyldenlove, illegitimate son of a previous king. The king's children with Hansen where baptized in the local parish church near the manor, where they were officially listed as the legitimate children of the wife of a non existent man called \"Frederick Hansen, ship writer from Gothenburg to China\". The frequent trips to Ulriksholm by Hansen as soon as her pregnancies with the king became evident was publicly noted. Neither Else Hansen nor any other of the king's mistresses where ever any official mistress introduced at the royal court, nor did they have any influence upon state affairs whatever, as politics where entrusted by the king to his favorite Moltke.\n\nIn 1752, the relationship between the king and Hansen may have ended – in any case, it was not mentioned more or resulted in any more children. She settled in the property Kejrup near Ulriksholm with her children, officially with the status of \"widow of the late sea captain de Hansen\".\n\nLater life\nAfter the death of Frederick in 1766, she acquired the estate Klarskov on Funen. She sold Klarskov and moved to Odense in 1768. In 1771, however, she bought Klarskov a second time and continued to live there until her death.\n\nHer children were not officially recognized, but unofficially they were taken care of by the royal court: her daughters were given a dowry and married to royal officials and the sons careers where protected, and her grandchildren where also provided with an allowance from the royal house.\n\nAfter Hansen, the king did not have any long term mistress until Charlotte Amalie Winge (1762–66).\n\nLegacy\nAt Frederiksborgmuseet, there are three paintings of Hansen by Jens Thrane the younger from 1764. Hansen is known by Dorothea Biehl's depiction of the decadent court life of Frederick V.\n\nIssue \nHer children were officially listed with the father \"Frederick Hansen, sea captain\".\nFrederikke Margarethe de Hansen (1747–1802)\nFrederikke Catherine de Hansen (1748–1822)\nAnna Marie de Hansen (1749–1812)\nSophie Charlotte de Hansen (1750–1779)\nUlrik Frederik de Hansen (1751–1752)\n\nSources\n Charlotte Dorothea Biehl, Interiører fra Frederik V's Hof, udgivet af Louis Bobé.\n Aage Christens, Slægten de Hansen, 1968.\n\nReferences\n\n1720 births\n1784 deaths\nMistresses of Danish royalty\n18th-century Danish people\n18th-century Danish women landowners\n18th-century Danish landowners",
"Maria Komnene (c. 1144 – 1190) was Queen of Hungary and Croatia from 1163 until 1165. Maria's father was Isaac Komnenos (son of John II).\n\nMarriage\nShe married c. 1157 to King Stephen IV of Hungary (c. 1133 – 11 April 1165). They did not have any children.\n\nSources \n Kristó Gyula - Makk Ferenc: Az Árpád-ház uralkodói (IPC Könyvek, 1996)\n Korai Magyar Történeti Lexikon (9-14. század), főszerkesztő: Kristó Gyula, szerkesztők: Engel Pál és Makk Ferenc (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1994)\n\nHungarian queens consort\n1140s births\n1190 deaths\nMaria\n12th-century Byzantine women\n12th-century Hungarian women\n12th-century Byzantine people\n12th-century Hungarian people"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage"
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?
| 1 |
How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
she married a free black man named John Tubman.
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| true |
[
"The Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden is part of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway (Maryland) and is located in Cambridge, Maryland. It honours the life of abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the journeys of the many people she assisted to escape slavery. The garden features information boards and murals, some of which were painted by Charles Ross, a relative of Tubman's.\n\nReferences\n\nMemorials to Harriet Tubman\nGardens in Maryland",
"Before She Was Harriet is a 2017 children's picture book written by Lesa Cline-Ransome and illustrated by James E. Ransome, first published by Holiday House. It was awarded an honorary Coretta Scott King Award in 2018.\n\nSynopsis \nThis children's picture book details the life of Harriet Tubman in a free verse journey on a train. It begins with Tubman as an old woman and moves backwards chronologically. The author outlines the many roles of Tubman: a suffragist, a boatman who ferried slaves across the Combahee River, a Union spy, a nurse for soldiers, a savior who helped her parents flee from slavery, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a slave named Minty, and finally a young slave named Araminta. She chooses to change her name to Harriet when she leaves slavery. The book ends with a picture of Tubman sitting on a train, finally free.\n\nBackground \nThe book was written and illustrated by husband and wife team Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome. They have previously collaborated on fifteen books together. Cline-Ransome was nervous about approaching a book on Tubman, as there were already so many of them. Her husband did some research and suggested she write about Tubman's many roles in life. Ransome had already illustrated books about slavery before, so finding references was not a problem. Instead of painting historically accurate images, he focused on making them emotionally accurate.\n\nReception \nThis book was very well received. Horn Book Magazine wrote about James Ransome illustrating Harriet's face at different angles, but always with determination. In a starred Publishers Weekly review praises the author's use of beautiful concise language and the illustrator's \"lush scenes.\" A starred Booklist review, mentions how the poetry is simple enough for children while still being sophisticated in content. The critic says, \"Libraries likely already have many Harriet Tubman books, but this well designed, unique approach warrants making room for one more.\" The publication also included it in their list of the \"Top 10 Biographies for Youth.\" Critics from Kirkus Reviews enjoyed James Ransom's double paged watercolor illustrations, as they would help children fix themselves \"in each time and place as the text takes them further into the past.\" Barbara L. Talcroft from Children's Literature says, \"Lesa Cline-Raonsome and James E. Ransome have created a fitting tribute to her with Before She Was Harriet. The Ransomes take readers on a journey through time, exploring the many roles Harriet Tubman assumed in her extraordinary life.\"\n\nIt was awarded the 2018 honorary Coretta Scott King Award .\n\nReferences \n\n2017 children's books\nAmerican children's books\nBiographies about African-American people"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman."
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
When did she get married to John Tubman?
| 2 |
When did Harriet Tubman get married to John Tubman?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
Around 1844,
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| true |
[
"Harriet Tubman's family includes her birth family; her two husbands, John Tubman and Nelson Davis; and her adopted daughter Gertie Davis.\n\nTubman's parents—Benjamin \"Ben\" Ross and Henrietta \"Rit\" Greene Ross—were enslaved people who were owned by two different families. Their lives came together when Mary Pattison Brodess, Rit's owner, married Anthony Thompson. Ben Ross, owned by Thompson, met and married Rit Greene. They lived together until about 1823 or 1824, when Rit and their children went to the Brodess farm. Ben was a timber estimator and foreman and Rit was a domestic servant. After Ben was freed, he bought his wife's freedom. Ben was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and slaveholders were becoming suspicious of his role in escapes in the area. Tubman, having freed other family members, rescued her parents. After a short period in St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, Tubman and her parents settled in the Auburn, New York area.\n\nTubman married a free man, John Tubman in 1844. In 1849, Tubman fled the area, believing that she was going to be sold. She returned to the area to bring John Tubman north with her, but he had already married another woman. Tubman operated a boarding house out of her home in Auburn and Nelson Davis boarded with her for three years before they were married in 1869. Davis fought during the American Civil War. They adopted a girl, Gertie, and operated several businesses out of their farm. They raised pigs and chickens, operated a farm, and sold eggs and butter.\n\nShe made 13 trips to Maryland to bring back her brothers and parents, other family members, friends and others. She did not know of the whereabout of her sisters, except Rachel who was separated from her children and died before the family could be reunited.\n\nBackground\nFamily members of enslaved people were often spread out over a distance. Sometimes it was because they were sold to other slaveholders, in other cases because their enslaver had multiple properties that required slaves to be rotated across several residences. Sometimes, enslaved people were hired out for work. Children born to an enslaved woman were owned by the mother's slaveholder. In the case of Harriet Tubman's family members, their lives changed as needed to meet their slaveholder's needs. Their slaveholders were white Brodess, Pattison, Stewart, and Thompson families of the Eastern Shore of Maryland.\n\nAnthony Thompson married Mary Pattison Brodess, which brought together enslaved people from their families. Edward Brodess, son of Mary, became Thompson's stepson. Around the time of Tubman's birth, there was conflict in the family over a house in Bucktown that Anthony Thompson built for Edward when he reached the age of 21. Edward did not pay for the construction and Thompson sued him in 1823. Brodess counter-sued stating that he did not like the house. The case dragged on into 1827, mostly because Brodess did not appear in court. But Brodess ultimately won the case. In the meantime, in 1823 or 1824, Brodess declared ownership of Rit and her children and had them brought over to the Brodess farm, separating Ben from his family.\n\nBen and Rit Greene Ross\nBorn Araminta \"Minty\" Ross, her parents were Benjamin \"Ben\" and Harriet \"Rit\" Greene Ross. They were \"respected as clever, honest, and religious people with a strong sense of family loyalty\".\n\nBen\n\nAround 1785 or 1787, Benjamin Ross was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, the property of wealthy landowner Anthony Thompson, who married Mary Pattison in 1803. She was the slaveholder of Rit Greene. Ben and Rit were married in 1808, through an informal marital ceremony, which was their only option to commit to one another.\n\nBen was a lumberman who supervised slaves who brought down poplar, oak, and cypress trees. He then transported them to Baltimore, where they were used to build ships. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, Ben and Tubman both worked on digging canals for Lewis and John T. Stewart, who were shipbuilders.\n\nAnthony Thompson died in 1836. In the early 1840s, Ben was emancipated and received 10 acres of land following Anthony Thompson's death, as stipulated in his will. Thompson's son, Dr. Anthony C. Thompson, a \"timber magnate\" and a physician, inherited the estate. He also owned Poplar Neck, an area in southern Caroline County, where Thompson sent free laborers and enslaved people. Poplar Neck is approximately 35 miles from Peters Neck, where Tubman was born. Ben once said that Dr. Thompson was \"a rough man towards his slaves, and declared, that he had not given him a dollar since the death of his father\". He ultimately sold his 10 acres to Dr. Thompson.\n\nHe continued to work as a foreman and lumber estimator by hiring himself out within the Eastern Shore for $5 () a day. He saved his earnings to buy his wife's freedom. \n\nHe was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, which included hiding people on his property in Caroline County. The increase in successful escapes drew the attention of local law enforcement in 1857. He was seen as a \"primary agitator\", such as with the escape of the Dover Eight, which led to Ben and Rit's trip north to avoid retribution. They initially moved to St. Catharines, Ontario in Canada, but the climate was too cold for the 70-year-old couple and they then moved to Fleming outside of Auburn, New York.\n\nRit\nRit was born about 1785 or 1787 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Rit and her mother Modesty were owned by Atthow Pattison, and they lived on his 265-acre farm near Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge east of the convergence of the Blackwater and Little Blackwater Rivers. Tubman believed that Modesty had arrived in the colonies on a ship from Africa. Her grandmother may have come from the area now known as Ghana on West Africa's Gold Coast. People of that area are of the Ashanti ethnic group. In 1791, Modesty does not appear in Pattison's will.\n\nIn January 1797, Pattison died and left Rit to his granddaughter Mary Pattison, who was the wife of Joseph Brodess. There was a stipulation in Pattison's will that she and her children should be freed when they reached forty five years of age. In 1803, Mary Pattison Brodess married Anthony Thompson, who had an enslaved man named Benjamin Ross. She died in 1809 and her son Edward inherited her estate. \n\nInitially, her enslaved parents and siblings lived in Ben Ross's cabin on the Anthony Thompson farm at Peters Neck in Dorchester County, Maryland, in what is now the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Around 1823 or early 1824, after the death of Mary Pattison Brodess Thompson, Edward had Rit and her five children moved ten miles away to the Brodess farm in Bucktown, where she worked as a domestic servant. Edward sold her daughter Linah. He attempted to sell her son Moses to a slave trader from Georgia, but Rit traded off hiding him in the woods and her cabin until the trader gave up and left.\n\nEdward Brodess decided not to honor the stipulation in Pattison's will that would have freed Rit and her children at the age of 45. Edward died in 1849. Eliza Ann Brodess inherited her husband Edward's estate. Edward, and then his wife, Eliza Ann, hired Rit out and kept the money that Tubman earned. Gorney Pattison, great-grandson of Atthow, filed a lawsuit against Brodess for the monies that she earned, since she and her husband had not honored Atthow Pattison's wishes. Pattison lost the case.\n\nBen purchased his wife's freedom from Eliza Ann Brodess for $20 () in 1854 or 1855, and the bill of sale was recorded on June 11, 1855, at the Dorchester County Court. Rit was not manumitted because a law of Maryland did not permit for enslaved people over age 45 to be set free. She then lived at Ben's cabin in Caroline County.\n\nFreedom in New York\nFearing that she was going to be sold away from Maryland, Tubman ran away in 1849. She followed the \"north star\" and was aided by white and black people to make her way north. Her parents were among the people that she brought north and out of slavery. They escaped with Tubman in 1857. \n\nTubman arrived in Caroline County, Maryland with a horse and a makeshift wagon to pick up her parents, as well as the belongings they most treasured on their trip north. They traveled at night to a train that took them to Wilmington, Delaware, where they waited for Harriet at the home of Thomas Garrett. After a stop in Philadelphia to meet William Still, they headed north on a train to St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, where Tubman had her headquarters and waited for fugitive slaves. \n\nTubman made a meager income chopping and selling wood and working for farmers. Her parents spent a difficult winter, subject to illnesses from the cold. William H. Seward, the governor of New York, helped arrange for the purchase of land in Auburn, New York for Tubman and her parents. Her parents lived in Auburn the rest of their lives. When Tubman was away on Underground Railroad trips or during the American Civil War, friends looked after her parents. Ben died about 1871 in Auburn, New York. Rit died in October 1880, nearly 100 years of age.\n\nSiblings and other family members\nBen and Rit had nine children together. Dorchester County records provide the names of Harriet's four sisters: Linah (b. 1808), Mariah Ritty (b. 1811), Sopha (b. 1813), and Rachel—and four brothers: Robert (b. 1816), Ben (b. 1824), Henry, and Moses. Harriet also considered two of her nieces as sisters: Harriet and Kessiah Jolley.\n\nEdward Brodess sold three of Tubman's sisters, whom she never saw again. A trader later wanted to buy her youngest brother, Moses, but Rit was able to resist being separated from her son.\n\nA conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman made 13 return trips over 10 years to lead about 70 people north, including her parents, siblings, and friends to freedom. Her first trip was in December 1850 when her niece Kessiah and her two children were to be sold. At the auction, Kessiah was sold to her husband John Bowley, a free black man. Before the children could be sold, the family left with Tubman for Philadelphia. Tubman led three of her brothers and other people away from Peters Neck on Christmas, 1854. Doing so, she took the risk of becoming enslaved again or lynched if she was caught, escaping slavery was particularly more risky after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. As a result, Tubman extended travel routes into Canada, where slavery was prohibited.\n\nThree of Tubman's brothers worked at plantation near a free black named Jacob Jackson. In 1854, Tubman had a letter sent to Jackson to coordinate the escape of the young men. She would look for them at her parent's home at Poplar Neck in Caroline County. The end of the letter states \"tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer and when the good ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step on board.\" She was particularly concerned that her brothers would be sold to the Deep South.\n\nFor ten years, during multiple attempts, Tubman tried to rescue her sister Rachel, and her children, Angerine and Ben. During those attempts, Rachel had been separated from her children and she would not leave without them. In late 1860, Tubman found that Rachel had died and she was unable to rescue her niece and nephew.\n\nHer brother John, his wife Millie, and their son Moses lived next to Tubman in Auburn. A number of nieces and nephews lived in Auburn, New York.\n\nMarriage and child\n\nJohn Tubman\nShe was married in 1844 to John Tubman, a free man. He was a neighbor of Ben Ross. Tubman had asked for permission to marry and live with John, which she received, but she was still to work for Broadess. She changed her given name about the same time, becoming Harriet Tubman. If they had any children, they would have been the property of the Brodess family. See Partus sequitur ventrem.\n\nRealizing she was to be sold following her enslaver's death, Tubman escaped in 1849, when she was 27 years of age. She returned to lead her husband north with her, and she brought a new suit for him to wear on the trip north. However, he had married another woman who was free. He was killed in 1867 following a dispute with Robert Vincent, a white man, over ashes that Vincent wanted removed from a tenant's house. They fought in the morning and Vincent chased Tubman with an axe, but he was not able to catch him. Later in the day, he saw Tubman and shot him in the forehead. Vincent drove on without checking Tubman's condition. Tubman was killed instantly. Vincent was arrested on November 4, 1867. He was tried, and was found not guilty. He had claimed to the all-white jury that Tubman had come after him with a club.\n\nNelson Davis\n\nTubman established herself in Auburn, New York on land that she bought from William H. Seward in early 1859 and the house was a haven for family and friends. In 1866, Tubman met Nelson Davis from Elizabeth City when he became a boarder at her house. He lived at her house for three years and they were married on March 18, 1869, at the Central Presbyterian Church. Davis was more than twenty years younger than Tubman. He was first known as Nelson Charles who had worked for a Charles family and probably escaped slavery by the Underground Railroad around 1861, perhaps on the Pasquotank River and the Great Dismal Swamp, which are both sites on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. After he escaped, he changed his name to Nelson Davis, using the surname of his father, Milford Davis. He lived in Oneida County, New York by 1861. About 1863, he enlisted in the Union army and fought during the American Civil War. At the end of the war, he was discharged in Texas. In 1874, Tubman and Davis adopted a girl named Gertie.\n\nTubman and Davis operated a 7-acre farm and brick business in Auburn. They raised chickens and pigs and grew potatoes, vegetables and apples. Tubman sold butter and eggs. Tubman also continued to board people. Rit Ross lived at the house, as did four boarders. Between 1882 and 1884, their frame house was burned down, and a brick building was constructed. Around that time, Davis was very ill, requiring care, and he was unable to work. She also helped out family members in need, like her nephew John Henry Stewart's surviving wife Eliza and three children.\n\nDavis died in 1888 of tuberculosis. Under the name Harriet Tubman Davis, she filed for pension benefits, which were provided for Civil War veteran's spouses.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nSource\n \n\nHarriet Tubman\nPeople from Dorchester County, Maryland",
"\n\nHarriet Tubman's birthplace is in Dorchester County, Maryland. Araminta Ross, the daughter of Benjamin (Ben) and Harriet (Rit) Greene Ross, was born into slavery in 1822\n in her father's cabin. It was located on the farm of Anthony Thompson at Peter's Neck, at the end of Harrisville Road, which is now part of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.\n\nAfter a few years, she lived on the Brodess farm with her mother and siblings. In the early 1840s, her father was emancipated and received 10 acres of land following Anthony Johnson's death. She was married in 1844 to John Tubman, at the same time, she changed her given name, becoming Harriet Tubman. Realizing she was to be sold following her enslaver's death, Tubman escaped in 1849, when she was 27 years of age. A conductor on the Underground Railroad, she made 13 return trips over 10 years to lead her parents, siblings, and friends to freedom.\n\nIn March 2021, archaeologists excavated what they determined to be the site of Ben Ross's cabin. They found artifacts from the 1800s, including broken dish ware, glass, a button, and nails. In April 2021, it was said that the site was to be added to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Scenic Byway. It is a scenic drive with more than 30 stops over 125 miles.\n\nSee also\n List of Underground Railroad sites\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\n Clues of Harriet Tubman's birthplace found in Dorchester County, WBAL-TV 11 Baltimore on YouTube\n\nHarriet Tubman\nDorchester County, Maryland"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman.",
"When did she get married to John Tubman?",
"Around 1844,"
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
How many children did they have?
| 3 |
How many children did Harriet Tubman and John Tubman have?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
little is known about him or their time together,
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| true |
[
"Robotic pets are artificially intelligent machines that are made to resemble actual pets. While the first robotic pets produced in the late 1990s were not too advanced, they have since grown technologically. Many now use machine learning (algorithms that allow machines to adapt to experiences independent of humans), making them much more realistic. Most consumers buy robotic pets with the aim of getting similar companionship that real pets offer, without some of the drawbacks that come with caring for live animals. The pets on the market currently have a wide price range, from the low hundreds into the several thousands of dollars. Multiple studies have been done to show that we treat robotic pets in a similar way as actual pets, despite their obvious differences. However, there is some controversy regarding how ethical using robotic pets is, and whether or not they should be widely adopted in elderly care.\n\nHistory \nThe first robotic pets to be put on the market were Hasbro’s Furby in 1998 and Sony’s AIBO in 1999. Since then, robotic pets have grown increasingly advanced.\n\nSome popular robotic pets today are:\n\n Joy for All (by Hasbro) Companion Pets\n Zoomer Interactive Kittens and Puppies\n PARO Robot Seals by Intelligent Systems Co.\n AIBO (upgraded) by Sony\n\nCommon Uses \nThe primary consumer group is elderly people that live alone or in nursing homes, who often suffer from loneliness and social isolation. For this group, robotic pets can be helpful because they often are unable to consistently walk, feed, or otherwise take care of an actual pet. Robotic pets are also marketed towards dementia patients, who are people that suffer from loss of memory and thinking skills. These people often suffer extreme loneliness due to not remembering their loved ones, but having physical contact and constant reminders of a robotic pet can lessen that feeling. For example, a study done in Texas and Kansas found that dementia residents who had group sessions with a PARO (brand of robotic pet) for three months showed decreased anxiety and less behavioral problems, when compared to a control group that experienced activities in a traditional nursing home, such as music and physical activity.\n\nAffordability \nWhen robotic pets were first introduced into the market, they were not very financially feasible for most people. Even now, there remains a large price gap between different types of robotic pets. For example, PAROs robotic pet seals cost $6,120, making them unaffordable to most individual consumers. They are therefore bought more by nursing homes, hospitals, or other institutions. On the other end of the price spectrum are Joy For All’s Companion Pets. These only cost about $120, which makes it more realistic for individual consumers, such as elderly adults who live alone.\n\nCurrently, there is very little insurance coverage available for robotic pet owners. Medicare only covers the costs of certain robotic pets (PARO) for use by therapists, not by any individuals. However, Medicaid and some private insurers are exploring the idea of including robotic pets in their healthcare. If this were to happen, it would significantly boost the sales of the pets.\n\nEffectiveness \nSince the effectiveness of a robotic pet depends heavily on how much consumers see it as a real animal, multiple studies have been done comparing robotic pets to other things, such as live animals and inanimate objects (toys). The studies often focus on whether the robot / animal / toy is seen to have the following characteristics:\n\nRobotic Pet vs Stuffed Animal \nOne study in 2004 compared how children interacted with Sony’s AIBO versus with a stuffed dog. The researchers did this by letting the children play with either the stuffed toy or the AIBO for three minutes, and then asking the children a series of questions to determine how they viewed each one. The study found that, when the children were asked questions about the characteristics of either AIBO or the stuffed animal, they responded in similar ways. This held true when they were asked questions concerning biological essence, mental states, sociability, and moral standing. However, there were differences in how the children behaved with AIBO versus the stuffed animal. For example, in the questionnaire the children responded that both the AIBO and the stuffed dog could hear verbal commands. But when the researchers observed how the children interacted with the AIBO or stuffed dog, they found that more children gave verbal commands to the AIBO.\n\nRobotic Pet vs Live Animal \nAnother study in 2005 compared children's interactions with the AIBO and with a live dog. The researchers did this by letting the children play freely with either the AIBO or the real dog for five minutes, and then asking the children a series of questions to determine how they viewed each one. The study found that more children preferred to play with the live dog over the AIBO, and more children affirmed that the live dog had a physical essence, a mental state, sociability, and moral standing. However, the researchers found that the AIBO was given some dog-like attributes, even if not treated entirely like the dog. For example, many of the children thought the AIBO could have feelings, such as happiness or sadness. Some also thought that the AIBO could be their friend, and that it wasn't okay to kick the AIBO if it did something bad.\n\nBoth these studies concluded that robotic pets such as AIBO often aren't categorized as either alive or inanimate, but rather in a new category in between the other two. For example, children in the first study treated the AIBO differently than they treated the stuffed toy, even though they stated that the two were very similar. In contrast, the children in the second study stated that the live dog was different from the AIBO, but ended up treating the two similarly. These findings show that we consciously identify robotic pets as inanimate objects, but we behave as if they are closer to real pets than they are to toys.\n\nControversy \nWhile robotic pets have proven to be beneficial to many consumers, especially those who are elderly, there remains some controversy about certain ethical issues. One study from 2016 attempted to discuss two main ethical considerations: elderly consumers may not be able to recognize that the robots aren't actual pets, and that the robot pets will come to replace human interaction. Those who participated in the study came to the conclusion that for most consumers, neither issue is major concern. They found that most robotic pet owners understood that the robot pet was animated, even if they formed a pet-like relationship with it. Additionally, the study participants argued that the robotic pets would more likely be used in a way that facilitated more social interactions in a group setting, such as at a dog park. However, these issues continue to cause debate because there is a minority of consumers, including many dementia patients, who may fail to recognize that the robot is animated.\n\nReferences \n\n \nPets",
"Cognitively Guided Instruction is \"a professional development program based on an integrated program of research on (a) the development of students' mathematical thinking; (b) instruction that influences that development; (c) teachers' knowledge and beliefs that influence their instructional practice; and (d) the way that teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and practices are influenced by their understanding of students' mathematical thinking\". CGI is an approach to teaching mathematics rather than a curriculum program. At the core of this approach is the practice of listening to children's mathematical thinking and using it as a basis for instruction. Research based frameworks of children's thinking in the domains of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, base-ten concepts, multidigit operations, algebra, geometry and fractions provide guidance to teachers about listening to their students. Case studies of teachers using CGI have shown the most accomplished teachers use a variety of practices to extend children's mathematical thinking. It's a tenet of CGI that there is no one way to implement the approach and that teachers' professional judgment is central to making decisions about how to use information about children's thinking. \n\nThe research base on children' mathematical thinking upon which CGI is based shows that children are able to solve problems without direct instruction by drawing upon informal knowledge of everyday situations. For example, a study of kindergarten children showed that young children can solve problems involving what are normally considered advanced mathematics such as multiplication, division, and multistep problems, by using direct modeling. Direct modeling is an approach to problem solving in which the child, in the absence of more sophisticated knowledge of mathematics, constructs a solution to a story problem by modeling the action or structure. For example, about half of the children in a study of kindergartners' problem solving were able to solve this multistep problem, which they had never seen before, using direct modeling: 19 children are taking a mini-bus to the zoo. They will have to sit either 2 or 3 to a seat. The bus has 7 seats. How many children will have to sit three to a seat, and how many can sit two to a seat?\n\nExample: Fred had six marbles at school. On the way home from school his friend Joey gave him some more marbles. Now Fred has eleven marbles. How many marbles did Joey give to Fred?\n\nStudents may solve this problem by counting down from eleven or by counting up from six. With the use of manipulatives students would be able to represent their thoughts for this problem multiple ways. For instance, they might make a row of six counting blocks next to a row of eleven counting blocks and then compare the difference.\n\nThe CGI philosophy is detailed in Children's Mathematics which is co-authored by Thomas Carpenter, Elizabeth Fennema, Megan Loef Franke, Linda Levi, and Susan Empson.\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\nCarpenter, T. P., Ansell, E., Franke, M. L., Fennema, E. & Weisbeck, L. (1993). Models of problem solving: A study of kindergarten children's problem-solving processes. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 24(5), 427–440.\nCarpenter, T., Fennema, E., Franke, M., L. Levi, and S. Empson. Children's Mathematics, Second Edition: Cognitively Guided Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2014.\nCarpenter, T. P., Fennema, E., Franke, M., Levi, L. & Empson, S. B. (2000). Cognitively Guided Instruction: A Research-Based Teacher Professional Development Program for Mathematics. Research Report 03. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Center for Education Research.\nReport on CGI effectivenss\n\nElementary mathematics\nMathematics education"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman.",
"When did she get married to John Tubman?",
"Around 1844,",
"How many children did they have?",
"little is known about him or their time together,"
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
How did they meet?
| 4 |
How did Harriet Tubman and John Tubman meet?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| false |
[
"Sarah Kramer is a Canadian vegan cookbook author. She is the best-selling author of How It All Vegan, The Garden of Vegan, La Dolce Vegan! and Vegan A Go-Go!. In 2012, she released Go Vegan! w/Sarah Kramer, one of the world's first vegan cookbook iPhone/iPad apps. \nKramer has written for publications such as Herbivore Magazine, Veg News and Shared Vision. She runs a popular vegan website/blog at govegan.net. She had a small vegan boutique called Sarah's Place that opened in 2011 and closed 2 years later after a diagnosis of breast cancer. Sarah did treatment in 2013 and now works full time at the business Tattoo Zoo that she co-owns with her wife, Geri Kramer in Victoria, BC. Sarah and Geri have a podcast called Meet The Kramers in which they discuss their 25-year marriage in relation to Geri's coming out as a trans woman in 2019.\n\nBooks\n How It All Vegan (with Tanya Barnard) (1999) \n The Garden Of Vegan (with Tanya Barnard) (2003) \n La Dolce Vegan (2005) \n Vegan A Go-Go! (2008) \n How It All Vegan: 10th Anniversary Edition (2009)\n\nPodcast \n\n Meet The Kramers podcast\n\nSee also\n Vegan\n List of vegans\n\nReferences\n\nInterviews and articles\n Article in Shared Vision\n Podcast Interview on Vegan Freak Radio\n Interview with The Cookbook Store\n Interview with Abebooks.com\n\nExternal links\n Meet The Kramers podcast\n Tattoo Zoo\n Sarah's Blog\n GoVegan.net, Sarah's website\n Arsenal Pulp Press, Sarah's publisher\n\nChefs of vegan cuisine\nCanadian women chefs\nCanadian food writers\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nWriters from Regina, Saskatchewan\nCanadian cookbook writers\nVegan cookbook writers",
"The situation, task, action, result (STAR) format is a technique used by interviewers to gather all the relevant information about a specific capability that the job requires. \n\n Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenging situation in which you found yourself.\n Task: What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation. Some performance development methods use “Target” rather than “Task”. Job interview candidates who describe a “Target” they set themselves instead of an externally imposed “Task” emphasize their own intrinsic motivation to perform and to develop their performance.\n Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what the alternatives were.\n Results: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions? Did you meet your objectives? What did you learn from this experience? Have you used this learning since?\n\nThe STAR technique is similar to the SOARA technique.\n\nThe STAR technique is also often complemented with an additional R on the end STARR or STAR(R) with the last R resembling reflection. This R aims to gather insight and interviewee's ability to learn and iterate. Whereas the STAR reveals how and what kind of result on an objective was achieved, the STARR with the additional R helps the interviewer to understand what the interviewee learned from the experience and how they would assimilate experiences. The interviewee can define what they would do (differently, the same, or better) next time being posed with a situation.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nThe ‘STAR’ technique to answer behavioral interview questions\nThe STAR method explained\n\nJob interview"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman.",
"When did she get married to John Tubman?",
"Around 1844,",
"How many children did they have?",
"little is known about him or their time together,",
"How did they meet?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
When did Harriet first run away?
| 5 |
When did Harriet Tubman first run away?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| false |
[
"Harriet Pitt (12 October 1748 – 10 December 1814) was a British actress and dancer.\n\nLife\nPitt was born to Ann Pitt who was an actress. In 1758 she was appearing doing recitations. The theatrical career did not involve major parts but she did appear at the Drury Lane Theatre and the Covent Garden Theatre.\n\nHer first child was George Cecil Pitt (baptised 1767 – 1820), fathered by George Anderson. George Cecil Pitt became a musician and was the father of the dramatist George Dibdin Pitt, who as a young man took Dibdin as his middle name in honour of his uncles, Harriet's later sons.\n\nShe established a relationship with Charles Dibdin who already had a family and together they had four children. The eldest was the songwriter Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin who was born in 1768. The next, a daughter, Harriott, was born in 1770 and died in infancy. Another son and songwriter was Thomas John Dibdin who was born in 1771. A second daughter, known also as Harriet Pitt (1772-1836) became an actress at Saddler's Wells.\n\nHarriet gave birth to Charles in Russell Court, Covent Garden, he was named after his father's librettist Isaac Bickerstaffe and their character Mungo in an afterpiece entitled The Padlock. Charles Dibdin made his theatrical debut opposite his younger brother Thomas John Dibdin in David Garrick's The Jubilee in 1775. Soon after this performance, his parents separated, and Charles changed his surname to Pitt. David Garrick was Thomas's godfather and he looked after the family when the elder Charles Dibdin abandoned this family too. Harriet entrusted the upbringing of her children to her uncle, Cecil Pitt, and he sent both boys away to a boarding school at Barnard Castle. The school kept them there even during the holidays and Thomas did not return for five years.\n\nHarriet appeared at the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1770s as she started to use the name \"Mrs Davenett\". Still using this new name she obtained regular work at the Covent Garden during most of the 1780s and until 1793.\n\nPitt retired in 1793 and she was buried, with her mother, in 1814.\n\nReferences\n\n1740s births\n1814 deaths\nEnglish stage actresses",
"The Fifth Child is a short novel by the British writer Doris Lessing, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988, and since translated into several languages. It describes the changes in the happy life of a married couple, Harriet and David Lovatt, as a consequence of the birth of Ben, their fifth child. A sequel, Ben, in the World (2000) recounts Ben's life after he has left his family.\n\nPlot\nWhen David Lovatt meets Harriet at an office party, they both immediately fall in love. They both share the same conservative outlooks, which they perceive to be a rarity in the London of the 1960s.\n\nThe two marry and purchase a large house in a small town within commuting distance of London. The couple intends to have several children—a wish frowned upon by the rest of the family. By the time they have four children–two boys and two girls–their house becomes a centre of joy not only for them but for all their relatives and friends who come and visit. This continues until Harriet has a fifth, wildly dysfunctional child, Ben. Her painful pregnancy with him marks the beginning of the misery and suffering that this child brings to the whole family.\n\nCharacters\nHarriet Lovatt. Main female character. Married to David Lovatt\nDavid Lovatt. Main male character. Married to Harriet Lovatt\nLuke. Harriet's and David's first child\nHelen. Harriet's and David's second child\nJane. Harriet's and David's third child\nPaul. Harriet's and David's fourth child\nBen. Harriet's and David's fifth child and the focus of the story\nJames Lovatt. David's and Deborah's father. He has divorced Molly and married Jessica instead.\nMolly. \nDeborah Lovatt. David's sister\nDorothy. Harriet's mother\nSarah. Harriet's sister. She is married to William and has children with him, one being Amy, who has Down syndrome.\nAngela. Harriet's sister\nJohn. A young man who takes care of Ben. He goes away to Manchester for a job-training offer.\nMary Jones. A girl Ben injures\nDr. Gilly. A specialist that Harriet and Ben see in London\nBilly, Derek, Vic, and Elvis. Several boys whose gang Ben joins when he's older\n\nReferences\n\nNovels by Doris Lessing\nJonathan Cape books\n1988 British novels\n1988 fantasy novels"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman.",
"When did she get married to John Tubman?",
"Around 1844,",
"How many children did they have?",
"little is known about him or their time together,",
"How did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"When did Harriet first run away?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
Can you tell me anything else about Harriet's family?
| 6 |
Besides Harriet Tubman being married to John Tubman, can you tell me anything else about Harriet Tubman's family?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage,
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| true |
[
"\"Anything You Want\" may refer to:\n\n\"(Make Me Do) Anything You Want\", a hit single by A Foot in Coldwater 1972\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by John Valenti\t1976\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by The Lambrettas\t1981\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by Dinah Brown feat Trevor Walters (singer)\t1999\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by Spoon from the album Girls Can Tell\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by Towers Of London\t2008\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by Whitesnake from Restless Heart (Whitesnake album)\n\"Anything You Want (You Got It)\", a song by April Wine I Like to Rock 2002\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by Jackie Lee (R&B singer)\t2009\n\n\"Anything You Want\", a song by John Forence 1968",
"Box of Secrets is the debut album by English rock band Blood Red Shoes, which was released on 14 April 2008 on the Mercury Records label. The album was leaked to the internet during November 2007.\n\nSeveral of the tracks were previously released as limited edition singles by the band, including \"I Wish I Was Someone Better\", \"ADHD\", \"It's Getting Boring By the Sea\" and \"You Bring Me Down\". The latter single was re-recorded and re-issued prior to the album's release. \"Try Harder\" was a B-side on the original single release of \"You Bring Me Down\". All of the band's singles appear as re-recorded versions on Box of Secrets, with the exception of \"I Wish I Was Someone Better\". The single \"Say Something, Say Anything\" was released on 7 April 2008 to coincide with the album release.\n\nThe title track does not appear on the album. \"Box of Secrets\" was a B-side on the \"It's Getting Boring by the Sea\" single and is also featured on the compilation album I'll Be Your Eyes. The title is derived from a phrase between the two members to describe things that they can tell each other, but not anyone else.\n\nThe closing track, \"Hope You're Holding Up\", is the first recorded Blood Red Shoes song to feature someone other than the band themselves playing an instrument, with Harriet from Los Campesinos! playing the violin.\n\nTrack listing\n\nExternal links\nOfficial Blood Red Shoes website\nBox of Secrets Review\n\nReferences \n\nBlood Red Shoes albums\n2008 debut albums\nMercury Records albums"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman.",
"When did she get married to John Tubman?",
"Around 1844,",
"How many children did they have?",
"little is known about him or their time together,",
"How did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"When did Harriet first run away?",
"I don't know.",
"Can you tell me anything else about Harriet's family?",
"Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage,"
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
Why did she change her name?
| 7 |
Why did Harriet Tubman change her name?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| true |
[
"Zaré Thalberg, born Ethel Western, (16 April 1858 – 17 March 1915) was a British operatic singer and actress who was thought at one time to have been born in Greece.\n\nLife\nThalberg was born in Derbyshire in 1858. Her name was Ethel Western and she took the name of Thalberg after taking singing lessons from the pianist Sigismond Thalberg. She debuted at the Royal Opera House in London as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni after training in Paris and Milan.\n\nIn 1879 her voice gave way and she was obliged to give up her career at Covent Garden. However, she joined Edwin Booth as an actress in the United States and did not return to England until the 1890s. She acted under the name of Ethel Western.\n\nHer photo was found in the pocket of Henry Irving after she died. For many years the picture was misidentified as Nelly Moore, who had died in 1869. Much later the picture was identified as Thalberg. The Irving Society offer no rationale as to why he should have been carrying her photo as there is no evidence that they did (or did not) know each other.\n\nThere are photos of her in the National Portrait Gallery, London, appearing in Lucretia Borgia in the 1890s.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1858 births\n1915 deaths\nPeople from Derbyshire\nEnglish operatic sopranos\nEnglish actresses",
"Beverly Gooden is an African American writer and social activist known for her groundbreaking work in domestic violence, victimology, and women's health, who created the Why I Stayed hashtag (#WhyIStayed) and movement in 2014. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the U.S. Office on Women's Health, and NBC's Today.\n\nEarly life and education\nBorn in Cleveland, Ohio, Beverly lived in foster care until being adopted by the Gooden family as a child. As a sophomore at Hampton University, she was selected as a media scholar with the Summer Research Opportunities Program at the University of Iowa and researched the connection between alcohol advertisements and teen drinking and driving. During her junior year, she interned with the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire as a reporter on Capitol Hill, covering the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and NCAA recruiting reform. In 2005, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism and communications. She went on to attend Loyola University Chicago and graduated with a master's degree in social justice in 2009.\n\nActivism\nOn September 8, 2014, Beverly created the hashtag #WhyIStayed in response to the Ray Rice video released by TMZ. A survivor of domestic violence, she tweeted several reasons why she remained in an abusive marriage as a direct response to widespread victim blaming of Janay Rice.\n\nTwo days later, Gooden was interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America, where she explained her motivations for creating the Why I Stayed movement. \"The reason that I started the hashtag was to give voice to the people out there who had that voice taken away. I think what bothered me most was that the question was 'why did she stay?' and not 'why did he hit her?'. And we do this across the board with violent situations, we do this with domestic violence by asking 'why did she stay?' and we do this with rape by saying 'why did she wear that?' as if your clothing or your mere presence gives someone the right to hurt you.\"\n\nShe has been featured on Good Morning America, CNN, Time, The Washington Post, HLN, Inside Edition, NBC Nightly News, and more.\n\nWhy I Stayed was listed as one of the top social change hashtags of 2014 by Forbes, and one of the \"top 10 hashtags that started a conversation\" by Time magazine. In March 2015, Why I Stayed was recognized as one of \"8 hashtags that changed the world\".\n\nThe Bolt Bag Project\nIn 2014, Beverly founded the Ella Mae Foundation, which supports \"protection and superior upbringing for children as well as self-actualization and equitable rights for women\". She created the Bolt Bag Project, a program that provides basic necessities to anonymous survivors of relationship violence.\n\nCareer\nGooden served as a development intern at the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness during graduate school in 2008. Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, she worked for various government and nonprofit agencies to secure or administer housing and food resources for those affected by the crisis. As a grant recipient of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 funding while serving as continuum of care coordinator, she worked with organizations to find stable and affordable housing for families facing housing insecurity in Chicago; Hampton Roads, Virginia; and northwest Georgia.\n\nAppearances\nIn September 2014, Gooden made guest appearances on the Dr. Phil show and in Verizon's 2014 Domestic Violence Summit at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. In October 2015, she contributed a piece to the U.S. Office on Women's Health blog. She was also featured in the short film Why We Stayed by Emmy Award-nominated producers of Private Violence. She wrote an article, \"Why We Stayed\", for The New York Times, and appeared in the December 2015 issue of Redbook magazine. She was featured in the August 2016 issue of Glamour magazine; and appeared in a Toyota commercial discussing her work with the Ella Mae Foundation, sponsored by Investigation Discovery. She was featured in the September 2018 issue of Ebony magazine in an article titled \"The Struggle To Get Out\".\n\nHonors and awards\nBeverly was given the \"Digital Champion\" Heart of Courage award by the Mary Kay Foundation in October 2017. She was chosen by Investigation Discovery and Glamour magazine as the 2015 Inspire A Difference \"Everyday Hero\" award winner. She was honored at an event in New York City alongside Angie Harmon, Grace Gealey, and AnnaLynne McCord.\n\nBook\nHer memoir, Surviving: Why We Stay and How We Leave Abusive Relationships, is set for publication in spring 2022 by Rowman & Littlefield.\n\nPersonal life\nGooden plays three musical instruments, and is an avid children's literature reader with a special interest in fantasy and folklore. She speaks openly about having a total hysterectomy after a decade of debilitating uterine fibroids. She lives in Houston, Texas.\n\nExternal links\n\nFacebook\nTwitter\nInstagram\n\nReferences\n\nPeople from Cleveland\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
] |
[
"Harriet Tubman",
"Family and marriage",
"How many times did Harriet Tubman get married?",
"she married a free black man named John Tubman.",
"When did she get married to John Tubman?",
"Around 1844,",
"How many children did they have?",
"little is known about him or their time together,",
"How did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"When did Harriet first run away?",
"I don't know.",
"Can you tell me anything else about Harriet's family?",
"Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage,",
"Why did she change her name?",
"Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative."
] |
C_7e93c8e6fe2a4360a13305c11944f2dd_0
|
Where did Tubman go when she escaped?
| 8 |
Where did Harriet Tubman go when she escaped?
|
Harriet Tubman
|
By 1840, Tubman's father, Ben, was manumitted from slavery at the age of 45, as stipulated in a former owner's will, though his actual age was closer to 55. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had held him as a slave. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families had ignored this stipulation when they inherited the slaves. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman. Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. Since the mother's status dictated that of children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom. Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.
Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.
Birth and family
Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.
As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says "the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.
Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.
Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.
Childhood
Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.
As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.
After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.
Family and marriage
Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.
Around 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.
Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.
Escape from slavery
In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, "I changed my prayer", she said. "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.
As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".
Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.
Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.
Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:
Nicknamed "Moses"
After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.
In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.
Early next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.
In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.
Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: "On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... " The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.
Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:
Over 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.
Routes and methods
Tubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: "She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them." Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.
Her journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.
While being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.
Tubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of "Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"
She carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "You go on or die." Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.
Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.
Despite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."
John Brown and Harpers Ferry
In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.
Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.
The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."
Auburn and Margaret
In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.
Shortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her "niece", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". Alice described it as a "kidnapping".
However, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.
In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.
American Civil War
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be "contraband"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.
Tubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. "God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing", she said.
Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.
Scouting and the Combahee River Raid
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.
Later that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. "I never saw such a sight", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.
More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."
For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.
During a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.
Later life
Despite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.
Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.
Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.
Facing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.
New York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid "the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy". The bill was defeated in the Senate.
The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.
Suffragist activism
In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.
Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.
This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.
AME Zion Church, illness, and death
At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.
As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: "I go to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.
Legacy
Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.
Museums and historical sites
In 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.
In southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.
As early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
In December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.
Twenty-dollar bill
On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
Artistic portrayals
Tubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as "The Ballad of Harriet Tubman" by Woody Guthrie, the song "Harriet Tubman" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental "Harriet Tubman" by Wynton Marsalis.
Theater and opera
There have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.
Literature
In printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a "deliberate distortion". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Film and television
Tubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled "Go Down Moses" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became "one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.
Monuments and memorials
Sculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.
Visual arts
Visual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman "as a heroic leader" who would "idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life "one of the great American sagas". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.
Other honors and commemorations
Tubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.
Numerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.
Tubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for "the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World".
Historiography
The first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.
See also
List of enslaved people
List of suffragists and suffragettes
Richard Amos Ball
Tilly Escape
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress
Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson
Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com
The Tubman Museum of African American History
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park
Michals, Debra. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2015.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. "Harriet Tubman". National Women's History Museum. 2016.
1822 births
1913 deaths
African-American abolitionists
American people with disabilities
American rebel slaves
Fugitive American slaves
Underground Railroad people
History of slavery in Maryland
History of Maryland
African-American history of Maryland
African Americans in the American Civil War
African-American female military personnel
Women in the American Civil War
American Civil War spies
Female wartime spies
People of Maryland in the American Civil War
African-American activists
American women's rights activists
American women activists
African-American feminists
19th-century African-American people
Activists from Maryland
African-American nurses
American women nurses
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
African-American Methodists
19th-century Methodists
20th-century Methodists
20th-century Christian saints
Anglican saints
Christian female saints of the Late Modern era
New Jersey Hall of Fame inductees
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
Proponents of Christian feminism
People with epilepsy
People from Auburn, New York
People from Cayuga County, New York
People from Dorchester County, Maryland
People from Port Royal, South Carolina
American people of Ashanti descent
American people of Ghanaian descent
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
Methodist abolitionists
| false |
[
"Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.\n\nBorn enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.\n\nIn 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or \"Moses\", as she was called) \"never lost a passenger\". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.\n\nWhen the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.\n\nBirth and family \n\nTubman was born Araminta \"Minty\" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet (\"Rit\") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was held by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.\n\nAs with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Kate Larson records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement, while Jean Humez says \"the best current evidence suggests that Tubman was born in 1820, but it might have been a year or two later\". Catherine Clinton notes that Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820.\n\nTubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the US on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.\n\nRit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and \"the Georgia man\" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, \"You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.\" Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.\n\nChildhood \n\nTubman's mother was assigned to \"the big house\" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named \"Miss Susan\". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, she was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.\n\nAs a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check the muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to \"the boy on the Swanee River\", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song \"Old Folks at Home\". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.\n\nAs an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a metal weight at another enslaved person who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: \"broke my skull\". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life; Larson suggests she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury.\n\nAfter her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of the New Testament that urged slaves to be obedient, and found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.\n\nFamily and marriage \nAnthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at the age of 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother's legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Tubman's mother, Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of 45. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit's children, and that any children born after she reached 45 years of age were legally free, but the Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved people. Challenging it legally was an impossible task for Tubman.\n\nAround 1844, she married a free Black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her slave status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriagesfree people of color marrying enslaved peoplewere not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the Black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.\n\nTubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.\n\nEscape from slavery \n\nIn 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value as a slave. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways. She said later: \"I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me.\" When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, \"I changed my prayer\", she said. \"First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way. A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.\n\nAs in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. \"[T]here was one of two things I had a right to\", she explained later, \"liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other\".\n\nTubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because the enslaved were hired out to another household, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to $100 for each slave returned. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have just become a father. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.\n\nSoon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She tried to send word of her plans beforehand to her mother. She sang a coded song to Mary, a trusted fellow enslaved, that was a farewell. \"I'll meet you in the morning\", she intoned, \"I'm bound for the promised land.\" While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal but well-organized system was composed of free and enslaved Blacks, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were members of the Religious Society of Friends, often called Quakers. The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slaverynortheast along the Choptank River, through Delaware and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.\n\nTubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The \"conductors\" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other fugitives from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:\n\nNicknamed \"Moses\" \n\nAfter reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. \"I was a stranger in a strange land,\" she said later. \"[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free.\" She worked odd jobs and saved money. The U.S. Congress meanwhile passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which heavily punished abetting escape and forced law enforcement officialseven in states that had outlawed slaveryto assist in their capture. The law increased risks for escaped enslaved, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario (then part of the United Province of Canada) which, as part of the British Empire, had abolished slavery. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as waves of poor Irish immigrants competed with free Blacks for work.\n\nIn December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and her two children, six-year-old James Alfred, and baby Araminta, would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free Black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. Then, while the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.\n\nEarly next year she returned to Maryland to help guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her brother Moses and two unidentified men. Tubman likely worked with abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a Quaker working in Wilmington, Delaware. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and biographers agree that with each trip to Maryland, she became more confident.\n\nIn late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. She saved money from various jobs, purchased a suit for him, and made her way south. Meanwhile, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene, but then decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together, until he was killed 16 years later in a roadside argument with a white man named Robert Vincent.\n\nBecause the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for escaped slaves to remain, many escaped slaves began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 fugitives, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. In his third autobiography, Douglass wrote: \"On one occasion I had eleven fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for them to remain with me until I could collect sufficient money to get them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter. ... \" The number of travelers and the time of the visit make it likely that this was Tubman's group.\n\nDouglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. When an early biography of Tubman was being prepared in 1868, Douglass wrote a letter to honor her. He compared his own efforts with hers, writing:\n\nOver 11 years, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional fugitives who escaped to the north. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed \"Moses\", alluding to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for $20. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight escaped slaves. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north to St. Catharines, Ontario, where a community of former slaves (including Tubman's brothers, other relatives, and many friends) had gathered.\n\nRoutes and methods \nTubman's dangerous work required tremendous ingenuity; she usually worked during winter months, to minimize the likelihood that the group would be seen. One admirer of Tubman said: \"She always came in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people who have homes stay in them.\" Once she had made contact with escaping slaves, they left town on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning.\n\nHer journeys into the land of slavery put her at tremendous risk, and she used a variety of subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former owner in Dorchester County, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as another former master; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.\n\nWhile being interviewed by author Wilbur Siebert in 1897, Tubman named some of the people who helped her and places that she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with aiding hundreds of freedom seekers escape to safer places farther north in New York, New England, and present-day Southern Ontario.\n\nTubman's religious faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of \"consulting with God\", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Thomas Garrett once said of her, \"I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.\" Her faith in the divine also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of \"Go Down Moses\" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led fugitives across the border, she would call out, \"Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!\"\n\nShe carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it. The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group. Tubman told the tale of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation when morale got low among a group of fugitive slaves. She pointed the gun at his head and said, \"You go on or die.\" Several days later, he was with the group as they entered Canada.\n\nSlaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that \"Minty\", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 \"was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her\". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.\n\nDespite the efforts of the slaveholders, Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: \"I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.\"\n\nJohn Brown and Harpers Ferry \n\nIn April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.\n\nThus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by \"General Tubman\", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in present-day Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.\n\nOn May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Ontario, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.\n\nTubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In late 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman could not be contacted. When the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman was not present. Some historians believe she was in New York at the time, ill with fever related to her childhood head injury. Others propose she may have been recruiting more escaped slaves in Ontario, and Kate Clifford Larson suggests she may have been in Maryland, recruiting for Brown's raid or attempting to rescue more family members. Larson also notes that Tubman may have begun sharing Frederick Douglass's doubts about the viability of the plan.\n\nThe raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a slave rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: \"[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living.\"\n\nAuburn and Margaret \nIn early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for . The city was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman seized the opportunity to deliver her parents from the harsh Canadian winters. Returning to the U.S. meant that escaped slaves were at risk of being returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, and Tubman's siblings expressed reservations. Catherine Clinton suggests that anger over the 1857 Dred Scott decision may have prompted Tubman to return to the U.S. Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.\n\nShortly after acquiring the Auburn property, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with her \"niece\", an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret. There is great confusion about the identity of Margaret's parents, although Tubman indicated they were free blacks. The girl left behind a twin brother and both parents in Maryland. Years later, Margaret's daughter Alice called Tubman's actions selfish, saying, \"she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her\". Alice described it as a \"kidnapping\".\n\nHowever, both Clinton and Larson present the possibility that Margaret was in fact Tubman's daughter. Larson points out that the two shared an unusually strong bond, and argues that Tubman – knowing the pain of a child separated from her mother – would never have intentionally caused a free family to be split apart. Clinton presents evidence of strong physical similarities, which Alice herself acknowledged. Both historians agree that no concrete evidence has been found for such a possibility, and the mystery of Tubman's relationship with young Margaret remains to this day.\n\nIn November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of . She had no money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to safely get away because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The children were drugged with paregoric to keep them quiet while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.\n\nAmerican Civil War \n\nWhen the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. General Benjamin Butler, for instance, aided escaped slaves flooding into Fort Monroe in Virginia. Butler had declared these fugitives to be \"contraband\"property seized by northern forcesand put them to work, initially without pay, in the fort. Tubman hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of Boston and Philadelphia abolitionists heading to the Hilton Head district in South Carolina. She became a fixture in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina, assisting fugitives.\n\nTubman met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the \"contrabands\" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons. \"God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing\", she said.\n\nTubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery. She rendered assistance to men with smallpox; that she did not contract the disease herself started more rumors that she was blessed by God. At first, she received government rations for her work, but newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment. To ease the tension, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.\n\nScouting and the Combahee River Raid \nWhen Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it an important step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She renewed her support for a defeat of the Confederacy, and in early 1863 she led a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. The marshes and rivers in South Carolina were similar to those of the Eastern Shore of Maryland; thus, her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge among potential enemies was put to good use. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.\n\nLater that year, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. When Montgomery and his troops conducted an assault on a collection of plantations along the Combahee River, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves stampeded toward the boats. \"I never saw such a sight\", she said later, describing a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, steamboats packed full of slaves took off toward Beaufort.\n\nMore than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. Newspapers heralded Tubman's \"patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability\", and she was praised for her recruiting efforts – most of the newly liberated men went on to join the Union army. Tubman later worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She described the battle by saying: \"And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.\"\n\nFor two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made periodic trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. The Confederacy surrendered in April 1865; after donating several more months of service, Tubman headed home to Auburn.\n\nDuring a train ride to New York in 1869, the conductor told her to move from a half-price section into the baggage car. She refused, showing the government-issued papers that entitled her to ride there. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the baggage car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train. Her act of defiance became a historical symbol, later cited when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in 1955.\n\nLater life \n\nDespite her years of service, Tubman never received a regular salary and was for years denied compensation. Her unofficial status and the unequal payments offered to black soldiers caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially difficult for her.\n\nTubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Charles Davis. Born in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869 they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874, and lived together as a family; Nelson died on October 14, 1888 of tuberculosis.\n\nTubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless remains an important source of information and perspective on Tubman's life. In 1886 Bradford released a re-written volume, also intended to help alleviate Tubman's poverty, called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc.\n\nFacing accumulated debts (including payments for her property in Auburn), Tubman fell prey in 1873 to a swindle involving gold transfer. Two men, one named Stevenson and the other John Thomas, claimed to have in their possession a cache of gold smuggled out of South Carolina. They offered this treasure – worth about $5,000, they claimed – for $2,000 in cash. They insisted that they knew a relative of Tubman's, and she took them into her home, where they stayed for several days. She knew that white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and also that black men were frequently assigned to digging duties. Thus the situation seemed plausible, and a combination of her financial woes and her good nature led her to go along with the plan. She borrowed the money from a wealthy friend named Anthony Shimer and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, however, they attacked her and knocked her out with chloroform, then stole her purse and bound and gagged her. When she was found by her family, she was dazed and injured, and the money was gone.\n\nNew York responded with outrage to the incident, and while some criticized Tubman for her naïveté, most sympathized with her economic hardship and lambasted the con men. The incident refreshed the public's memory of her past service and her economic woes. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill (H.R. 2711/3786) providing that Tubman be paid \"the sum of $2,000 for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy\". The bill was defeated in the Senate.\n\nThe Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as the widow of Nelson Davis. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of , plus a lump sum of to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension for her own service in the Civil War at . Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, the Congress passed and President William McKinley signed H.R. 4982, which approved a compromise amount of $20 per month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy. In 2003, Congress approved a payment of of additional pension to compensate for the perceived deficiency of the payments made during her life. The funds were directed to the maintenance of her relevant historical sites.\n\nSuffragist activism \n\nIn her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: \"I suffered enough to believe it.\" Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.\n\nTubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.\n\nThis wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on \"Eminent Women\" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.\n\nAME Zion Church, illness, and death \nAt the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for \"aged and indigent colored people\". The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She said: \"[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all.\" She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.\n\nAs Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and \"buzzing\" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, \"sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable\". She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.\n\nBy 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as \"ill and penniless\", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: \"I go to prepare a place for you.\" Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.\n\nLegacy \n\nWidely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the 20th century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum. The city of Auburn commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect (\"I nebber run my train off de track\"), apparently chosen for its authenticity, has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address.\n\nMuseums and historical sites\nIn 1937 a gravestone for Harriet Tubman was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The Harriet Tubman Home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church and opened as a museum and education center. A Harriet Tubman Memorial Library was opened nearby in 1979.\n\nIn southern Ontario, the Salem Chapel BME Church was designated a National Historic Site in 1999, on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The chapel in St. Catharines, Ontario was a focus of Tubman's years in the city, when she lived nearby, in what was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad and center of abolitionist work. In Tubman's time, the chapel was known as Bethel Chapel, and was part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, prior to a change to the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Tubman herself was designated a National Historic Person after the Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended it in 2005.\n\nAs early as 2008, advocacy groups in Maryland and New York, and their federal representatives, pushed for legislation to establish two national historical parks honoring Harriet Tubman: one to include her place of birth on Maryland's eastern shore, and sites along the route of the Underground Railroad in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot counties in Maryland; and a second to include her home in Auburn. For the next six years, bills to do so were introduced, but were never enacted. In 2013, President Barack Obama used his executive authority to create the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, consisting of federal lands on Maryland's Eastern Shore at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.\n\nIn December 2014, authorization for a national historical park designation was incorporated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite opposition from some legislators, the bill passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, authorized by the act, was established on January 10, 2017. In March 2017 the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center was inaugurated in Maryland within Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. The act also created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland within the authorized boundary of the national monument, while permitting later additional acquisitions. The Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey in 2020.\n\nThe National Museum of African American History and Culture has items owned by Tubman, including eating utensils, a hymnal, and a linen and silk shawl given to her by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. Related items include a photographic portrait of Tubman (one of only a few known to exist), and three postcards with images of Tubman's 1913 funeral.\n\nTwenty-dollar bill \nOn April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, \"People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on.\" In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.\n\nArtistic portrayals\n\nTubman is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions. Musicians have celebrated her in works such as \"The Ballad of Harriet Tubman\" by Woody Guthrie, the song \"Harriet Tubman\" by Walter Robinson, and the instrumental \"Harriet Tubman\" by Wynton Marsalis.\n\nTheater and opera\nThere have been several operas based on Tubman's life, including Thea Musgrave's Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, which premiered in 1985 at the Virginia Opera. Nkeiru Okoye also wrote the opera Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom first performed in 2014. In 2018 the world premier of the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes was given by Muziektheater Transparant in Huddersfield, UK. The libretto came from poetry by Mayra Santos-Febres and dialogue from Lex Bohlmeijer Stage plays based on Tubman's life appeared as early as the 1930s, when May Miller and Willis Richardson included a play about Tubman in their 1934 collection Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Other plays about Tubman include Harriet's Return by Karen Jones Meadows and Harriet Tubman Visits a Therapist by Carolyn Gage.\n\nLiterature\nIn printed fiction, in 1948 Tubman was the subject of Anne Parrish's A Clouded Star, a biographical novel that was criticized for presenting negative stereotypes of African-Americans. A Woman Called Moses, a 1976 novel by Marcy Heidish, was criticized for portraying a drinking, swearing, sexually active version of Tubman. Tubman biographer James A. McGowan called the novel a \"deliberate distortion\". The 2019 novel The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs focuses on Tubman's leadership of the Combahee River Raid. Tubman also appears as a character in other novels, such as Terry Bisson's 1988 science fiction novel Fire on the Mountain, James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird, and the 2019 novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.\n\nFilm and television\nTubman's life was dramatized on television in 1963 on the CBS series The Great Adventure in an episode titled \"Go Down Moses\" with Ruby Dee starring as Tubman. In December 1978, Cicely Tyson portrayed her for the NBC miniseries A Woman Called Moses, based on the novel by Heidish. In 1994, Alfre Woodard played Tubman in the television film Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad. In 2017, Aisha Hinds portrayed Tubman in the second season of the WGN America drama series Underground. In 2018, Christine Horn portrayed her in an episode of the science fiction series Timeless, which covers her role in the Civil War. Harriet, a biographical film starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The production received good reviews, and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Song. The film became \"one of the most successful biographical dramas in the history of Focus Features\" and made $43 million against a production budget of $17 million.\n\nMonuments and memorials\nSculptures of Tubman have been placed in several American cities. A 1993 Underground Railroad memorial fashioned by Ed Dwight in Battle Creek, Michigan features Tubman leading a group of slaves to freedom. In 1995, sculptor Jane DeDecker created a statue of Tubman leading a child, which was placed in Mesa, Arizona. Copies of DeDecker's statue were subsequently installed in several other cities, including one at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. It was the first statue honoring Tubman at an institution in the Old South. The city of Boston commissioned Step on Board, a bronze sculpture by artist Fern Cunningham placed at the entrance to Harriet Tubman Park in 1999. It was the first memorial to a woman on city-owned land. Swing Low, a statue of Tubman by Alison Saar, was erected in Manhattan in 2008. In 2009, Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland unveiled a statue created by James Hill, an arts professor at the university. It was the first sculpture of Tubman placed in the region where she was born.\n\nVisual arts\nVisual artists have depicted Tubman as an inspirational figure. In 1931, painter Aaron Douglas completed Spirits Rising, a mural of Tubman at the Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Douglas said he wanted to portray Tubman \"as a heroic leader\" who would \"idealize a superior type of Negro womanhood\". A series of paintings about Tubman's life by Jacob Lawrence appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. He called Tubman's life \"one of the great American sagas\". On February 1, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent stamp in honor of Tubman, designed by artist Jerry Pinkney. She was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. A second, 32-cent stamp featuring Tubman was issued on June 29, 1995. In 2019, artist Michael Rosato depicted Tubman in a mural along U.S. Route 50, near Cambridge, Maryland, and in another mural in Cambridge on the side of the Harriet Tubman Museum.\n\nOther honors and commemorations\nTubman is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. The calendar of saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America remembers Tubman and Sojourner Truth on March 10. Since 2003, the state of New York has also commemorated Tubman on March 10, although the day is not a legal holiday.\n\nNumerous structures, organizations, and other entities have been named in Tubman's honor. These include dozens of schools, streets and highways in several states, and various church groups, social organizations, and government agencies. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the , its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. An asteroid, (241528) Tubman, was named after her in 2014. A section of the Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, Maryland was renamed Harriet Tubman Grove in March 2018; the grove was previously the site of a double equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which was among four statues removed from public areas around Baltimore in August 2017. In 2021, a park in Milwaukee was renamed from Wahl Park to Harriet Tubman Park.\n\nTubman was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973, the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 2019.\n\nThe Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery awards the annual Harriet Tubman Prize for \"the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World\".\n\nHistoriography \nThe first modern biography of Tubman to be published after Sarah Hopkins Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad had experienced great difficulty in finding a publisherthe search took four yearsand endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's collective memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1943. Though she was a popular significant historical figure, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Author Milton C. Sernett discusses all the major biographies of Tubman in his 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History.\n\nSee also \n\n List of enslaved people\n List of suffragists and suffragettes\n Richard Amos Ball\n Tilly Escape\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links \n\n \n Harriet Tubman: Online Resources, from the Library of Congress\n Full text of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill\n Harriet Tubman Biography Page from Kate Larson\n Harriet Tubman Web Quest: Leading the Way to Freedom – Scholastic.com\n The Tubman Museum of African American History\n Harriet Tubman National Historical Park\n Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park\n Michals, Debra. \"Harriet Tubman\". National Women's History Museum. 2015.\n Maurer, Elizabeth L. \"Harriet Tubman\". National Women's History Museum. 2016.\n\n \n1822 births\n1913 deaths\nAfrican-American abolitionists\nAmerican people with disabilities\nAmerican rebel slaves\nFugitive American slaves\nUnderground Railroad people\nHistory of slavery in Maryland\nHistory of Maryland\nAfrican-American history of Maryland\nAfrican Americans in the American Civil War\nAfrican-American female military personnel\nWomen in the American Civil War\nAmerican Civil War spies\nFemale wartime spies\nPeople of Maryland in the American Civil War\nAfrican-American activists\nAmerican women's rights activists\nAmerican women activists\nAfrican-American feminists\n19th-century African-American people\nActivists from Maryland\nAfrican-American nurses\nAmerican women nurses\nPersons of National Historic Significance (Canada)\nAfrican-American Methodists\n19th-century Methodists\n20th-century Methodists\n20th-century Christian saints\nAnglican saints\nChristian female saints of the Late Modern era\nNew Jersey Hall of Fame inductees\nPeople celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar\nProponents of Christian feminism\nPeople with epilepsy\nPeople from Auburn, New York\nPeople from Cayuga County, New York\nPeople from Dorchester County, Maryland\nPeople from Port Royal, South Carolina\nAmerican people of Ashanti descent\nAmerican people of Ghanaian descent\nDeaths from pneumonia in New York (state)\n19th-century African-American women\n20th-century African-American women\n20th-century African-American people\nMethodist abolitionists",
"Harriet Tubman's family includes her birth family; her two husbands, John Tubman and Nelson Davis; and her adopted daughter Gertie Davis.\n\nTubman's parents—Benjamin \"Ben\" Ross and Henrietta \"Rit\" Greene Ross—were enslaved people who were owned by two different families. Their lives came together when Mary Pattison Brodess, Rit's owner, married Anthony Thompson. Ben Ross, owned by Thompson, met and married Rit Greene. They lived together until about 1823 or 1824, when Rit and their children went to the Brodess farm. Ben was a timber estimator and foreman and Rit was a domestic servant. After Ben was freed, he bought his wife's freedom. Ben was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and slaveholders were becoming suspicious of his role in escapes in the area. Tubman, having freed other family members, rescued her parents. After a short period in St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, Tubman and her parents settled in the Auburn, New York area.\n\nTubman married a free man, John Tubman in 1844. In 1849, Tubman fled the area, believing that she was going to be sold. She returned to the area to bring John Tubman north with her, but he had already married another woman. Tubman operated a boarding house out of her home in Auburn and Nelson Davis boarded with her for three years before they were married in 1869. Davis fought during the American Civil War. They adopted a girl, Gertie, and operated several businesses out of their farm. They raised pigs and chickens, operated a farm, and sold eggs and butter.\n\nShe made 13 trips to Maryland to bring back her brothers and parents, other family members, friends and others. She did not know of the whereabout of her sisters, except Rachel who was separated from her children and died before the family could be reunited.\n\nBackground\nFamily members of enslaved people were often spread out over a distance. Sometimes it was because they were sold to other slaveholders, in other cases because their enslaver had multiple properties that required slaves to be rotated across several residences. Sometimes, enslaved people were hired out for work. Children born to an enslaved woman were owned by the mother's slaveholder. In the case of Harriet Tubman's family members, their lives changed as needed to meet their slaveholder's needs. Their slaveholders were white Brodess, Pattison, Stewart, and Thompson families of the Eastern Shore of Maryland.\n\nAnthony Thompson married Mary Pattison Brodess, which brought together enslaved people from their families. Edward Brodess, son of Mary, became Thompson's stepson. Around the time of Tubman's birth, there was conflict in the family over a house in Bucktown that Anthony Thompson built for Edward when he reached the age of 21. Edward did not pay for the construction and Thompson sued him in 1823. Brodess counter-sued stating that he did not like the house. The case dragged on into 1827, mostly because Brodess did not appear in court. But Brodess ultimately won the case. In the meantime, in 1823 or 1824, Brodess declared ownership of Rit and her children and had them brought over to the Brodess farm, separating Ben from his family.\n\nBen and Rit Greene Ross\nBorn Araminta \"Minty\" Ross, her parents were Benjamin \"Ben\" and Harriet \"Rit\" Greene Ross. They were \"respected as clever, honest, and religious people with a strong sense of family loyalty\".\n\nBen\n\nAround 1785 or 1787, Benjamin Ross was born in Dorchester County, Maryland, the property of wealthy landowner Anthony Thompson, who married Mary Pattison in 1803. She was the slaveholder of Rit Greene. Ben and Rit were married in 1808, through an informal marital ceremony, which was their only option to commit to one another.\n\nBen was a lumberman who supervised slaves who brought down poplar, oak, and cypress trees. He then transported them to Baltimore, where they were used to build ships. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, Ben and Tubman both worked on digging canals for Lewis and John T. Stewart, who were shipbuilders.\n\nAnthony Thompson died in 1836. In the early 1840s, Ben was emancipated and received 10 acres of land following Anthony Thompson's death, as stipulated in his will. Thompson's son, Dr. Anthony C. Thompson, a \"timber magnate\" and a physician, inherited the estate. He also owned Poplar Neck, an area in southern Caroline County, where Thompson sent free laborers and enslaved people. Poplar Neck is approximately 35 miles from Peters Neck, where Tubman was born. Ben once said that Dr. Thompson was \"a rough man towards his slaves, and declared, that he had not given him a dollar since the death of his father\". He ultimately sold his 10 acres to Dr. Thompson.\n\nHe continued to work as a foreman and lumber estimator by hiring himself out within the Eastern Shore for $5 () a day. He saved his earnings to buy his wife's freedom. \n\nHe was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, which included hiding people on his property in Caroline County. The increase in successful escapes drew the attention of local law enforcement in 1857. He was seen as a \"primary agitator\", such as with the escape of the Dover Eight, which led to Ben and Rit's trip north to avoid retribution. They initially moved to St. Catharines, Ontario in Canada, but the climate was too cold for the 70-year-old couple and they then moved to Fleming outside of Auburn, New York.\n\nRit\nRit was born about 1785 or 1787 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Rit and her mother Modesty were owned by Atthow Pattison, and they lived on his 265-acre farm near Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge east of the convergence of the Blackwater and Little Blackwater Rivers. Tubman believed that Modesty had arrived in the colonies on a ship from Africa. Her grandmother may have come from the area now known as Ghana on West Africa's Gold Coast. People of that area are of the Ashanti ethnic group. In 1791, Modesty does not appear in Pattison's will.\n\nIn January 1797, Pattison died and left Rit to his granddaughter Mary Pattison, who was the wife of Joseph Brodess. There was a stipulation in Pattison's will that she and her children should be freed when they reached forty five years of age. In 1803, Mary Pattison Brodess married Anthony Thompson, who had an enslaved man named Benjamin Ross. She died in 1809 and her son Edward inherited her estate. \n\nInitially, her enslaved parents and siblings lived in Ben Ross's cabin on the Anthony Thompson farm at Peters Neck in Dorchester County, Maryland, in what is now the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Around 1823 or early 1824, after the death of Mary Pattison Brodess Thompson, Edward had Rit and her five children moved ten miles away to the Brodess farm in Bucktown, where she worked as a domestic servant. Edward sold her daughter Linah. He attempted to sell her son Moses to a slave trader from Georgia, but Rit traded off hiding him in the woods and her cabin until the trader gave up and left.\n\nEdward Brodess decided not to honor the stipulation in Pattison's will that would have freed Rit and her children at the age of 45. Edward died in 1849. Eliza Ann Brodess inherited her husband Edward's estate. Edward, and then his wife, Eliza Ann, hired Rit out and kept the money that Tubman earned. Gorney Pattison, great-grandson of Atthow, filed a lawsuit against Brodess for the monies that she earned, since she and her husband had not honored Atthow Pattison's wishes. Pattison lost the case.\n\nBen purchased his wife's freedom from Eliza Ann Brodess for $20 () in 1854 or 1855, and the bill of sale was recorded on June 11, 1855, at the Dorchester County Court. Rit was not manumitted because a law of Maryland did not permit for enslaved people over age 45 to be set free. She then lived at Ben's cabin in Caroline County.\n\nFreedom in New York\nFearing that she was going to be sold away from Maryland, Tubman ran away in 1849. She followed the \"north star\" and was aided by white and black people to make her way north. Her parents were among the people that she brought north and out of slavery. They escaped with Tubman in 1857. \n\nTubman arrived in Caroline County, Maryland with a horse and a makeshift wagon to pick up her parents, as well as the belongings they most treasured on their trip north. They traveled at night to a train that took them to Wilmington, Delaware, where they waited for Harriet at the home of Thomas Garrett. After a stop in Philadelphia to meet William Still, they headed north on a train to St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, where Tubman had her headquarters and waited for fugitive slaves. \n\nTubman made a meager income chopping and selling wood and working for farmers. Her parents spent a difficult winter, subject to illnesses from the cold. William H. Seward, the governor of New York, helped arrange for the purchase of land in Auburn, New York for Tubman and her parents. Her parents lived in Auburn the rest of their lives. When Tubman was away on Underground Railroad trips or during the American Civil War, friends looked after her parents. Ben died about 1871 in Auburn, New York. Rit died in October 1880, nearly 100 years of age.\n\nSiblings and other family members\nBen and Rit had nine children together. Dorchester County records provide the names of Harriet's four sisters: Linah (b. 1808), Mariah Ritty (b. 1811), Sopha (b. 1813), and Rachel—and four brothers: Robert (b. 1816), Ben (b. 1824), Henry, and Moses. Harriet also considered two of her nieces as sisters: Harriet and Kessiah Jolley.\n\nEdward Brodess sold three of Tubman's sisters, whom she never saw again. A trader later wanted to buy her youngest brother, Moses, but Rit was able to resist being separated from her son.\n\nA conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman made 13 return trips over 10 years to lead about 70 people north, including her parents, siblings, and friends to freedom. Her first trip was in December 1850 when her niece Kessiah and her two children were to be sold. At the auction, Kessiah was sold to her husband John Bowley, a free black man. Before the children could be sold, the family left with Tubman for Philadelphia. Tubman led three of her brothers and other people away from Peters Neck on Christmas, 1854. Doing so, she took the risk of becoming enslaved again or lynched if she was caught, escaping slavery was particularly more risky after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. As a result, Tubman extended travel routes into Canada, where slavery was prohibited.\n\nThree of Tubman's brothers worked at plantation near a free black named Jacob Jackson. In 1854, Tubman had a letter sent to Jackson to coordinate the escape of the young men. She would look for them at her parent's home at Poplar Neck in Caroline County. The end of the letter states \"tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer and when the good ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step on board.\" She was particularly concerned that her brothers would be sold to the Deep South.\n\nFor ten years, during multiple attempts, Tubman tried to rescue her sister Rachel, and her children, Angerine and Ben. During those attempts, Rachel had been separated from her children and she would not leave without them. In late 1860, Tubman found that Rachel had died and she was unable to rescue her niece and nephew.\n\nHer brother John, his wife Millie, and their son Moses lived next to Tubman in Auburn. A number of nieces and nephews lived in Auburn, New York.\n\nMarriage and child\n\nJohn Tubman\nShe was married in 1844 to John Tubman, a free man. He was a neighbor of Ben Ross. Tubman had asked for permission to marry and live with John, which she received, but she was still to work for Broadess. She changed her given name about the same time, becoming Harriet Tubman. If they had any children, they would have been the property of the Brodess family. See Partus sequitur ventrem.\n\nRealizing she was to be sold following her enslaver's death, Tubman escaped in 1849, when she was 27 years of age. She returned to lead her husband north with her, and she brought a new suit for him to wear on the trip north. However, he had married another woman who was free. He was killed in 1867 following a dispute with Robert Vincent, a white man, over ashes that Vincent wanted removed from a tenant's house. They fought in the morning and Vincent chased Tubman with an axe, but he was not able to catch him. Later in the day, he saw Tubman and shot him in the forehead. Vincent drove on without checking Tubman's condition. Tubman was killed instantly. Vincent was arrested on November 4, 1867. He was tried, and was found not guilty. He had claimed to the all-white jury that Tubman had come after him with a club.\n\nNelson Davis\n\nTubman established herself in Auburn, New York on land that she bought from William H. Seward in early 1859 and the house was a haven for family and friends. In 1866, Tubman met Nelson Davis from Elizabeth City when he became a boarder at her house. He lived at her house for three years and they were married on March 18, 1869, at the Central Presbyterian Church. Davis was more than twenty years younger than Tubman. He was first known as Nelson Charles who had worked for a Charles family and probably escaped slavery by the Underground Railroad around 1861, perhaps on the Pasquotank River and the Great Dismal Swamp, which are both sites on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. After he escaped, he changed his name to Nelson Davis, using the surname of his father, Milford Davis. He lived in Oneida County, New York by 1861. About 1863, he enlisted in the Union army and fought during the American Civil War. At the end of the war, he was discharged in Texas. In 1874, Tubman and Davis adopted a girl named Gertie.\n\nTubman and Davis operated a 7-acre farm and brick business in Auburn. They raised chickens and pigs and grew potatoes, vegetables and apples. Tubman sold butter and eggs. Tubman also continued to board people. Rit Ross lived at the house, as did four boarders. Between 1882 and 1884, their frame house was burned down, and a brick building was constructed. Around that time, Davis was very ill, requiring care, and he was unable to work. She also helped out family members in need, like her nephew John Henry Stewart's surviving wife Eliza and three children.\n\nDavis died in 1888 of tuberculosis. Under the name Harriet Tubman Davis, she filed for pension benefits, which were provided for Civil War veteran's spouses.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nSource\n \n\nHarriet Tubman\nPeople from Dorchester County, Maryland"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography"
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
What was the biography?
| 1 |
What was Louis C.K.s biography?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| false |
[
"Shi Liang (; March 27, 1900 – September 6, 1985) was a prominent lawyer and activist of the Republic of China. She was the only woman arrested in what was known as the Seven Gentlemen Incident on the eve of war with Japan in 1936. In 1949, she became the first Minister of Justice of the People's Republic of China.\n\nBiography\nShi Liang was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu in 1900. She was educated in Shanghai and became a lawyer there. She and another six intellectuals were arrested by Chiang Kai-shek’s government in 1936, in what is known as the Seven Gentlemen Incident.\n\nShi was the first Minister of Justice of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1959.\n\nCitations\n\nGeneral references\n\nExternal links \n Biography of Shi Liang \n Profile of Shi Liang \n\n1900 births\n1985 deaths\nAll-China Women's Federation people\nMembers of the China Democratic League\nMinisters of Justice of the People's Republic of China\nPeople's Republic of China politicians from Jiangsu\nPoliticians from Changzhou\nVice Chairpersons of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference\nVice Chairpersons of the National People's Congress\nWomen government ministers of China\n20th-century Chinese women politicians",
"The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is the opening sentence from Naipaul's book A Bend in the River.\nThe world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.\n\nFrench deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage in 1996.\n\nReception\nThe biography has been extensively reviewed: the reviewers include Paul Theroux, who wrote an earlier book about Naipaul.\nThe biography won unanimous praise from all quarters including Naipaul experts Teju Cole and James Wood in the New Yorker.\n\nAwards\nThe biography was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the Times' \"10 Best Books of 2008\". It won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and the British literary award the Hawthornden Prize.\n\nReferences\n\n2008 non-fiction books\nBiographies about writers\nHawthornden Prize-winning works\nNational Book Critics Circle Award-winning works"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography",
"What was the biography?",
"C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise"
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
Where did C.K. Grow up?
| 2 |
Where did C.K. Grow up?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico,
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| false |
[
"Grow Up may refer to:\nAdvance in age\nProgress toward psychological maturity\nGrow Up (book), a 2007 book by Keith Allen\nGrow Up (video game), 2016 video game\n\nMusic\nGrow Up (Desperate Journalist album), 2017\nGrow Up (The Queers album), 1990\nGrow Up (Svoy album), 2011\nGrow Up, a 2015 EP by HALO\n\"Grow Up\" (Olly Murs song)\n\"Grow Up\" (Paramore song)\n\"Grow Up\" (Simple Plan song)\n\"Grow Up\", a song by Rockwell\n\"Grow Up\", a song from the Bratz album Rock Angelz\n\"Grow Up\", a song by Cher Lloyd from Sticks and Stones\n\nSee also\nGrowing Up (disambiguation)\nGrow Up, Tony Phillips, a 2013 film by Emily Hagins",
"When I Grow Up may refer to:\n\nFilm and television \n \"When I Grow Up...\", an episode of Barney & Friends\n When I Grow Up (film), a 1951 film starring Bobby Driscoll\n When I Grow Up, a 2008 film by Michael Ferns\n\nLiterature \n When I Grow Up (webcomic), a webcomic by Jeffrey Rowland\n When I Grow up: A Memoir, a 2008 book by Juliana Hatfield\n When I Grow Up, a 2011 children's book by \"Weird Al\" Yankovic\n\nSongs \n \"When I Grow Up\" (Fever Ray song), 2009\n \"When I Grow Up\" (Garbage song), 1999\n \"When I Grow Up\" (The Pussycat Dolls song), 2008\n \"When I Grow Up\" (Matilda), a 2012 song from Matilda the Musical\n \"When I Grow Up\" (NF song), 2019\n \"When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)\", a 1964 song by The Beach Boys\n \"When I Grow Up\", a song by Clint Daniels\n \"When I Grow Up\", a song by Michelle Shocked from Short Sharp Shocked\n \"When I Grow Up\", a song performed by Shirley Temple in Curly Top (film), 1935\n\"When I Grow Up\", a children's song sung on Barney & Friends"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography",
"What was the biography?",
"C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise",
"Where did C.K. Grow up?",
"When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico,"
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
How long did he live in mexico?
| 3 |
How long did C.K. live in mexico?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| false |
[
"Live in Mexico City may refer to:\n\nLive in Mexico City (King Crimson album)\nMeltdown: Live in Mexico City, King Crimson 2018\nLive in Mexico City (Bass Communion and Pig album)\nLive in Mexico City, Dark Lunacy 2012\nLive in Mexico City, Lacrimosa (band) 2014",
"The Cry of Dolores () occurred in Dolores, Mexico, on 16 September 1810, when Roman Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang his church bell and gave the call to arms that triggered the Mexican War of Independence.\n\nEvery year on the eve of Independence Day, the President of Mexico re-enacts the cry from the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City, while ringing the same bell Hidalgo used in 1810.\n\nHistorical event\n\nIn the 1810s, what would become Mexico was still New Spain, part of the Spanish crown. The independence movement began to take shape when José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara went to the small town of Dolores (now known as Dolores Hidalgo) and asked the local Roman Catholic priest, Miguel Hidalgo, to help initiate an effort to free New Spain from Spanish control.\n\nGutiérrez de Lara went to Washington, D.C. for military support (being the first Mexican to do so). Hidalgo remained in Dolores, waiting for Gutiérrez de Lara to return with military support. However, fearing arrest, Hidalgo told his brother Mauricio to make the sheriff free the pro-independence inmates there. Mauricio and armed men set 80 inmates free in the early morning hours of 16 September 1810. Around 2:30 a.m., Hidalgo ordered the church bells to be rung and gathered his congregation. Flanked by Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, he addressed the people in front of his church, urging them to revolt. His speech became known as the \"Cry of Dolores\".\n\nThe liberated country adopted Mexico as its official name. Mexico's independence from Spain took a decade of war. Gutiérrez de Lara commanded and led Mexico to victory. Independence was achieved by the Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire on 28 September 1821. However, Hidalgo is credited as being the \"father of his country\".\n\nExact words and meaning\nScholars have not been able to reach a consensus on the exact words Miguel Hidalgo said at the time. Michael Meyer has noted: \"The exact words of this most famous of all Mexican speeches are not known, or, rather, they are reproduced in almost as many variations as there are historians to reproduce them.\"\n\nMeyer also argues that:\n\nIn contrast, William F. Cloud divides the sentiments above between Hidalgo and the crowd:\n\nMany believe that Hidalgo's Grito condemned the notion of monarchy and criticized the current social order in detail. In fact, his opposition was targeted to Spain and its viceroy in Mexico: that is, not against the monarchy in general but against \"bad government\". The Grito also emphasized loyalty to the Catholic religion, a sentiment with which both Mexican-born Criollos and Peninsulares (native Spaniards) could sympathize. However, the strong anti-Spanish cry of \"Death to Gachupines\" (Gachupines being a slur given to Peninsulares) would have shocked Mexico's elites.\n\nNational festivities\nThe day of 16 September was first celebrated in 1812 in Huichapan, Hidalgo. It was given the status of a national holiday in the Constitution of Apatzingán, ratified by the conventions of 1822 and 1824, and first celebrated nationally in 1825.\n\nThe Cry of Dolores has assumed an almost mythical status. Since the late 20th century, the event has come to symbolize Mexican independence and to initiate Independence Day ceremonies the following day (16 September). Independence Day in Mexico is a patriotic holiday, marked by parades, concerts, patriotic programs, drum and bugle and marching band competitions, and special programs on the national and local media outlets.\n\nPresidential celebration at Mexico City\n\nEvery 15 September at around 11 p.m., the President of Mexico stands on the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City and rings the same bell that Hidalgo rang in 1810, which was moved to the National Palace. The President then recites a shout of patriotism (a Grito Mexicano) based upon the \"Grito de Dolores\", with the names of the important heroes of the Mexican War of Independence who were there on that historic day. The Grito ends with the threefold shout of ¡Viva México!\n\nThe Grito often differs slightly from year to year to reflect recent sentiments, or a preference by the President for a shorter or longer shout. This is the version often recited by the President of Mexico:\n\nSpanish\n ¡Mexicanos!\n ¡Vivan los héroes que nos dieron patria!\n ¡Viva Hidalgo!\n ¡Viva Morelos!\n ¡Viva Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez!\n ¡Viva Allende!\n ¡Viva Aldama y Matamoros!\n ¡Viva la Independencia Nacional!\n ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México!\n\n English\n Mexicans!\n Long live the heroes who gave us our homeland!\n Long live Hidalgo!\n Long live Morelos!\n Long live Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez!\n Long live Allende!\n Long live Aldama and Matamoros!\n Long live the nation's independence!\n Long Live Mexico! Long Live Mexico! Long Live Mexico!\n\nBeneath the balcony of the National Palace, there is a large crowd in the Plaza de la Constitución (also called the Zócalo), to hear the recitation. The event draws up to half a million spectators from all over Mexico and tourists worldwide. After the President recites each line beginning with \"¡Viva(n)!\", the crowd responds by repeating, \"¡Viva(n)!\"\n\nAfter the recitation, the President rings the bell one last time and waves the Flag of Mexico to the applause of the crowd.\n\nThis is followed by the playing of the Mexican national anthem by a military band from the Mexican Armed Forces, with the crowd singing along. The ceremonies conclude with a spectacular fireworks display at the Zócalo grounds.\n\nOn the morning of 16 September, or Independence Day, the national military parade in honor of the holiday starts in the Zócalo and its outskirts, passes the Hidalgo Memorial and ends on the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s main boulevard, passing \"El Ángel de la Independencia\" memorial column and other places along the way.\n\nRecent exceptions\n\nThe Grito is not always re-enacted at the National Palace; some years it is performed in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, where it originally happened. This is especially common in the final year of a President's term.\n\nPresident Felipe Calderón made an exception by re-enacting the Grito in Dolores Hidalgo as part of the bicentennial celebrations on 16 September 2010, even though he had already done so the night before from the National Palace balcony to launch the celebrations. As a result, in 2012, Calderón's final year as President, he did not go to Dolores Hidalgo but gave the Grito from the National Palace balcony instead. President Enrique Peña Nieto did not give the Grito in Dolores Hidalgo in any of his six years as President, becoming the fourth president to break the tradition.\n\nMany presidents add their \"personal touch\" to the Grito and this can be controversial. President Vicente Fox frequently took liberties with it, adding and removing items, addressing Mexicans in both genders, and in 2001 wishing long life to \"our agreements\". Peña Nieto gave \"vivas\" to victims of recent earthquakes in 2017.\n\nDuring Peña Nieto's presidency, the Grito became an occasion for political protest against him and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). On 15 September 2016, a month after the president appeared to be humiliated by U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, thousands of citizens marched, yelled, and carried signs. They tried to enter the Zócalo during the Grito, but were blocked by a wall of soldiers. News outlets within Mexico failed to acknowledge the protest. The event was well-attended but opponents charge that the PRI brought acarreados (poor people or hand-picked party members) as a fake show of support.\n\nThe Grito was also disrupted in 2006 by a demonstration called the Plantón. Crowds loyal to losing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador protested alleged irregularities in the general election just concluded, and the Grito could not be delivered at the Zócalo but was spoken at the National Palace. López Obrador won the presidency in 2018.\n\nIn 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the Grito to be done remotely.\n\nCelebrations by governors and municipal presidents\n\nSimilar celebrations to the Presidential one occur in cities and towns throughout Mexico, and in Mexican embassies and consulates worldwide on 15 or 16 September. The chief executive, ambassador, or consul rings a bell and recites the traditional words, including the names of independence heroes and local patriots, and ending with the threefold shout of Viva Mexico! The bell rings a second time, the Mexican flag is waved, and everyone sings the National Anthem, followed by fireworks. There are also celebrations in schools throughout Mexico, and in these cases whenever the bell ringing is reenacted the school or university head utters the traditional words. Celebrations also take place outside of Mexico, such as in U.S. states that have a large concentration of people of Mexican heritage who celebrate the holiday.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading \n\nSr. Antonio Barajas Becerra, \"Entrada de los Insurgentes a la Villa de San Miguel El Grande, la tarde del Domingo, 16 de Septiembre de 1801.\"\nAntonio Barajas Beccera, 1969, Generalisimo don Ignacio de Allende y Unzaga, 2a edicion, p. 108 (\"a las cinco de la manana del domingo 16 de Septiembre, 1810\").\nGloria Cisneros Lenoir, Miguel Guzman Peredo, 1985, Miguel Hidalgo y la Ruta de la Independencia, Bertelsmann de Mexico, p. 87.\n\nExternal links \nMexico connect.com: \"El Grito\" (The Cry)\nBibliography and Hemerography: Miguel Hidalgo and Costilla.\nMiguel Hidalgo and Costilla - Documents of 1810 and 1811.\nChronology of Miguel Hidalgo and Costilla\n Mexico Celebrates Its Bicentennial - slideshow by Life magazine\n\nFiestas Patrias (Mexico)\nMexican War of Independence\n1810 in New Spain\nBattle cries\nColonial Mexico\nHistory of Guanajuato\nIndependent Mexico\nMexico\nPolitical catchphrases\nSeptember observances\nSeptember 1810 events"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography",
"What was the biography?",
"C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise",
"Where did C.K. Grow up?",
"When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico,",
"How long did he live in mexico?",
"they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven"
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
Where did he move to after after mexico?
| 4 |
Where did C.K. move to after mexico?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston.
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| false |
[
"On February 10, 2016, Carrier Air Conditioner, a division of United Technologies, announced that it was moving its manufacturing operations to Mexico. A cellphone video shot by an employee and posted on YouTube rapidly went viral, making this particular plant closing a national news story, after which Donald Trump made the company's decision to move to Mexico, \"a centerpiece of his stump speeches attacking free trade.\" The move played a role in the Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016, as a symbol of his protectionist position on international trade, and a lesser role in the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.\n\nShortly after becoming President-elect, Trump and Vice-President elect Mike Pence announced a deal with Carrier to keep some of the manufacturing jobs in Indiana, while others would still move to Mexico, in exchange for large tax credits granted to the corporation.\n\nDecision to move production offshore\n\nOn February 10, 2016 Carrier announced its plans to move its manufacture of air conditioning equipment, now located in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Monterrey, Mexico in 2017. The move of the Indianapolis plant to Mexico was expected to result in the loss of 1,400 jobs in Indianapolis. \n\nA company representative announced the information to an assembly of workers. He said, “The best way to stay competitive and protect the business for long-term is to move production from our facility in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico.” \n\nA cellphone video of a Carrier representative announcing the move was recorded by an employee and posted on YouTube; it quickly went viral. Introduced as part of a local news story, the video was posted on Facebook by LaKeisha Austin and picked up by Fox News, The Indianapolis Star and other news outlets on February 12. The slightly \"fuzzy\" footage, shot by an unidentified Carrier employee shows Carrier President Chris Nelson addressing employees assembled inside a Carrier plant. He tells that, \"I want to be clear, this is strictly a business decision,\" as \"agonized, collective cry goes up. People swear, shout and look away.\"\n\nAccording to Carol Rogers of the Indiana Business Research Center, the Carrier move drew national attention for reasons other than the video, in particular. the fact that 1,400 is an unusually large number of jobs to be terminate in a single offshoring event. The decision drew hundreds of protestors to Carrier's Indianapolis plant.\n\n2016 Presidential campaign\nAccording to The New York Times, three days after the Carrier announcement, Presidential candidate Donald Trump made the company's decision to move to Mexico, \"a centerpiece of his stump speeches attacking free trade.\" Carrier's move to Mexico quickly became a talking point in the 2016 presidential primary campaign as both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump used the Carrier move to criticize existing trade policies. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders called the Carrier move, \"another example of how NAFTA and other trade policies have been a disaster for American workers.\"\n\nDuring the February 13, 2016, Republican Presidential Primary Debate, Trump referenced the video, saying that if elected he would l impose a 35% tax on every air conditioner Carrier imports from Mexico. Trump used the Carrier move as \"a key talking point,\" during the campaign, telling the crowd gathered for a Trump for President rally in Dayton, Ohio that, \"I'm going to tell the head of Carrier: 'I hope you enjoy your stay in Mexico folks. But every single unit that you make and send across our border, which now will be real, you're going to pay a 35 percent tax.'\"\n\nThe Carrier firing video fueled popular anger over the offshoring of jobs that was reflected in the campaigns of both Sanders and Trump. Voters supporting both Sanders and Trump told The New York Times journalists that the loss of jobs caused by free trade policies was their #1 issue.\n\nFinancial journalists including David Dayen, and Lance Selfa have used the Carrier move to analyze the argument, made by Sanders and Trump, that the offshoring of manufacturing jobs hurts American workers.\n\nOthers focus on Trump's position. Dismissing Trump's argument as \"folk economics,\" Tim Worstall argues that moving production to low-wage countries like Mexico is good for Americans who can buy air conditioners more cheaply. Binyamin Appelbaum, writes that while the overwhelming majority of economists argue that importing goods manufactured by low-wage manufacturing work has been good for America because the balance of trade remains positive, economists have \"oversold their case,\" neglecting to encounter the reality that, \"trade has a downside, and while the benefits of trade are broadly distributed, the costs are often concentrated,\" borne by former factory workers. By contrast, Jim Cramer thinks Trump is correct when he asserts that trade deals lowering tariff barriers have devastated the American economy.\n\nReversal of decision to move to Mexico\nAlthough it was widely agreed that a reversal of the decision had appeared to be \"impossible,\" when Trump took the issue up during primary campaign season, In mid-November, shortly after being elected to the presidency, Trump called the CEO of United Technologies (owner of Carrier) and asked the CEO to keep operations in the US, stating that Trump's tax and regulatory policies meant Carrier would be \"printing money\". On November 24 Trump announced that he was \"making progress\" in persuading Carrier to reverse its decision; the company confirmed that it was discussion with the President elect and Vice President elect Mike Pence. On November 28, the CEO of United Technologies traveled to New York and met with Vice President-elect Pence at Trump Tower, where they reached a deal on state incentives. On November 29 Carrier announced that it would keep half of the 2,000 jobs it had planned to shift to Monterrey, Mexico in Indiana. Mike Pence, Governor of Indiana and Vice President elect was said to have taken the lead in negotiating with Carrier. On December 1, Trump and Pence visited the Carrier plant for a ceremony announcing the deal.\n\nActive negotiations of this kind by Presidents and Vice-Presidents elect are said to be highly unusual.\n\nDetails of the deal\nAs details emerged, it appeared that Carrier had agreed to keep one third of the 2,100 jobs it had planned to move to Mexico in Indiana in exchange for about $7 million in government subsidies over the course of 10 years. 800 jobs that Carrier had planned to move to Mexico will stay at the Indianapolis plant, while Carrier will move 600 from the Indianapolis plant to Mexico. However, United Technologies, the parent corporation of Carrier, will go ahead with plans to close a factory in Huntington, Indiana, that manufactures electronic controls, moving 700 jobs from Indiana to Mexico.\n\nThe deal also calls for a $16 million investment in the Indianapolis facility. Most of that money will be invested in automation said Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, Carrier's corporate parent. And that automation will replace some of the jobs that were saved. In June 2017, union officials stated that Carrier planned to lay off about 600 employees in July and December 2017. One forklift driver who worked at Carrier for 14 years who did not lose his job in the June closings interviewed by NPR's Morning Edition said he would be bumped down to an assembly line position that was likely to be cut later: \"I'm not really optimistic that they're going to be around in another five years,\" said employee David Simmons. \"I mean, I hope I'm wrong, but I just don't see it. I mean, they've been threatening this - to go to Mexico - for at least 10 years.\"\n\nDavid A. Graham at The Atlantic saw the Carrier deal as an early indication that Trump may enact some campaign pledges that had been widely viewed as mere campaign posturing.\n\nAftermath\nAs part of the deal, Carrier was permitted to move 600 jobs from Indiana to a plant in Mexico. The facility is located in Monterrey, Mexico. Carrier's labor costs are 80% lower in Mexico than in the USA. \n\nThe New York Times reported on August 10, 2018 that Carrier's Indianapolis furnace plant was plagued by low morale and absenteeism because “employees share a looming sense that a factory shutdown is inevitable — that Carrier has merely postponed the closing until a more politically opportune moment.”\n\nThe Washington Post reported in October 2020 that in early 2017 - four months after the deal was struck - Carrier started building a new facility in China. In May 2017, Carrier notified the state of Indiana that it was eliminating 632 jobs from the Indianapolis plant. \n\nAfter the deal was struck, Carrier kept approximately 800 jobs in Indiana that were originally planned to go to Mexico, but eliminated over 1,300 jobs in Indiana: 632 at the Indianapolis plant, and 738 from another plant in Indiana. In addition, Carrier eliminated 1,300 jobs outside Indiana as part of company-wide cost-cutting measures.\n\nDuring 2020, at least 17 Indiana-based companies moved some jobs from Indiana to Mexico, including Black & Decker and Johnson Controls. The total number of jobs moved in 2020 exceeds the number of jobs that were retained in the USA under the Carrier deal.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nDiscussion of video as reflection of working class discontent, PBS NewsHour \nCarrier Air Conditioner (part of United Technologies) Moving 1,400 Jobs to Mexico, YouTube.com\n\nUnited Technologies\nDonald Trump 2016 presidential campaign\nBernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign\nViral videos\n2016 YouTube videos\nControversies of the 2016 United States presidential election\n2016 in Indiana\nEconomy of Indianapolis\nMexico–United States relations\nTermination of employment\nMonterrey",
"The following low-power television stations broadcast on digital or analog channel 40 in the United States:\n\n K40AE-D in Cashmere, etc., Washington, to move to channel 15\n K40DD-D in Gruver, Texas, to move to channel 24\n K40GZ-D in Preston, Idaho\n K40IJ-D in Topeka, Kansas, to move to channel 22\n K40JV-D in Stateline, etc., California, to move to channel 16\n K40KC-D in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to move to channel 27\n K40MT-D in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, to move to channel 31\n KPCD-LP in Big Bear Lake, California\n\nThe following low-power stations, which are no longer licensed, formerly broadcast on digital or analog channel 40:\n K40BP in Alamogordo, New Mexico\n K40BX in Bigelow Bench Area, Wyoming\n K40CI in Eureka, Nevada\n K40EE in Pullman, Washington\n K40EN in Fairbanks, Alaska\n K40FY in Randolph & Woodruff, Utah\n K40GD in Fillmore, etc., Utah\n K40HC in Chama, New Mexico\n K40HE-D in Redding, California\n K40HJ in Lordsburg, New Mexico\n K40HZ in Wichita Falls, Texas\n K40IK-D in Wallowa, Oregon\n K40KQ-D in Wyola, Montana\n K40KZ in St. George, Utah\n K40LJ-D in Lincoln, Nebraska\n KCXP-LP in Aspen, Colorado\n KFBU-LD in Bozeman, Montana\n W40AN-D in Escanaba, Michigan\n WODF-LD in Rockford, Illinois\n WYDJ-LD in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina\n\nReferences\n\n40 low-power"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography",
"What was the biography?",
"C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise",
"Where did C.K. Grow up?",
"When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico,",
"How long did he live in mexico?",
"they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven",
"Where did he move to after after mexico?",
"they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston."
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
Did C.K. start stand-up comedy in Boston?
| 5 |
Did C.K. start stand-up comedy in Boston?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian,
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| true |
[
"The Boston Comedy Club was an American comedy club that was located at 82 West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village, New York City between Thompson Street and Sullivan Street. \n\nThe club was open from 1988 to 2005 and was a starting point for comedians such as Sarah Silverman, Jim Gaffigan, Neal Brennan, Adam Sandler, Jeff Ross, Bert Kreischer, Pete Holmes, Nate Bargatze, and Andrew Schulz.\n\nHistory\nThe Boston Comedy Club was founded in 1988 by comedy talent manager and producer Barry Katz. Katz started as a stand-up comedian in Boston in the 1980s, later becoming a booking agent for other comedians. Katz also opened up a talent agency in New York City and Louis C.K., whom Katz met while in Boston, was his first client. C.K. also helped Katz to install the wiring and lighting at the Boston Comedy Club and was the first comedian to perform there. \n\nNeal Brennan (co-creator of Chappelle Show) started as a doorman at the club and counted the experience as one of \"10 Defining Moments\" in his comedy career as per the list he put together for New York magazine's pop culture website Vulture. It was at the Boston Comedy Club that Brennan first performed stand up and where he first met Dave Chappelle. Sarah Silverman, Pete Holmes and Bert Kreischer all worked as \"barkers\" for the club in their early careers—barkers are responsible for announcing line ups and distributing fliers to people passing by the club's entrance. Adam Sandler started his comedy career at the club, performing there at age 17. Jeff Ross's first stand up performance was in 1994 at one of the club's open mic nights.\n\nThe club closed its doors in 2005. In 2016 a re-creation of the club was built for Pete Holmes's semi-autobiographical television series Crashing.\n\nDuring Katz's 2016 appearance on the Be Here For A While podcast hosted by comedian Rachael O'Brien, Katz was asked: \"Why did you call the club 'The Boston Comedy Club' in New York?\" Katz responded: \"Because clearly I'm an idiot.\"\n\nReferences\n\nComedy clubs in Manhattan\nDefunct comedy clubs in the United States\nGreenwich Village",
"Bill Braudis is a writer, voice actor and script writing instructor from Boston, Massachusetts who has also done stand-up comedy.\n\nCareer \nHe started in stand-up in 1981, doing open mics at The Comedy Connection, in Boston and the Ding Ho, in Cambridge. A little over a decade later, Braudis made his first of 3 appearances on The Tonight Show, with Jay Leno, which were soon followed up by two appearances on \"Late Night with Conan O'Brien.\"\n\nBraudis has appeared in several Soup2Nuts programs, voicing Doug Savage in Science Court, as well as voicing \"Bill,\" in Hey Monie!. Braudis also appeared in the first episode of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and played Dr. Meyers on O'Grady. Braudis wrote for these shows, along with Home Movies. He also wrote for the short-lived sitcom on the WB network, Raising Dad, made by Jonathan Katz, the same comedian who created Dr. Katz. Braudis did a short stint on the Adult Swim's Metalocalypse thanks to his friend, Brendon Small and writer Tommy Blacha.\n\nBesides Braudis's extensive TV writing, he has also written a feature film that was optioned and another that finished in the quarterfinals of the prestigious Nicholl Screenwriting Competition.\n\nPersonal life \nHe lives with his wife, two children and dogs in the suburbs of Boston and currently teaches TV and film writing in the Film and TV Department at Boston University.\n\nReferences\n\nWriters from Boston\nAmerican comedy writers\nAmerican stand-up comedians\nLiving people\nComedians from Massachusetts\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography",
"What was the biography?",
"C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise",
"Where did C.K. Grow up?",
"When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico,",
"How long did he live in mexico?",
"they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven",
"Where did he move to after after mexico?",
"they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston.",
"Did C.K. start stand-up comedy in Boston?",
"Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian,"
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
Did C.K. get the chance to become a writer?
| 6 |
Did C.K. get the chance to become a writer?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston.
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| true |
[
"Upendra Madhav(original name : Vintha Upendra Reddy) is an Indian film screenwriter, director and dialogue writer known for his works in Telugu cinema. He is known for his works in box office hits such as Baadshah, Dookudu, Aagadu and Bruce Lee - The Fighter.\n\nSelected filmography\n\nCareer \n\nHe came to the Telugu film industry wanting to become a director. He worked with Priyadarshini Ram as an assistant director for Manodu and Toss and directed some corporate films and films for the government. He would get a chance to join the direction department of big budget films but one thing led to another and he became a screenwriter including writing for Dookudu as associate writer which led to further screenwriting. His debut as a feature film director was the 2018 film MLA.\n\nAs a director\n\nAs a writer\n\nWebsite and Blog\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1978 births\nTelugu people\nIndian male screenwriters\nLiving people\nPeople from Guntur\nScreenwriters from Andhra Pradesh\nTelugu screenwriters",
"Karikala Kannan was the son of Aditya II, whose mother was Ilamadeviyar. In 971 CE, his father was killed in Kadambur, so he did not get the chance to become the next prince. His paternal uncle Rajaraja I crowned him as a chieftain of Kanchi after he became a King.\n\nReferences \n\nChola dynasty\n10th-century Indian monarchs"
] |
[
"Louis C.K.",
"Biography",
"What was the biography?",
"C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise",
"Where did C.K. Grow up?",
"When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico,",
"How long did he live in mexico?",
"they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven",
"Where did he move to after after mexico?",
"they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston.",
"Did C.K. start stand-up comedy in Boston?",
"Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian,",
"Did C.K. get the chance to become a writer?",
"After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston."
] |
C_64050e6c170c4a9c96f527d7221a6243_1
|
Where did C.K. graduate from?
| 7 |
Where did C.K. graduate from?
|
Louis C.K.
|
C.K. was born Louis A. Szekely in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (nee Davis) and economist Luis Szekely. His parents met at Harvard University, where his mother was completing her degree in a summer school program. They were married at St. Francis Church in Traverse City, Michigan. C.K. has three sisters. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Geza Szekely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon whose family moved to Mexico, where he met C.K.'s Mexican paternal grandmother, Rosario Sanchez Morales. C.K.'s mother, an American with Irish ancestry, grew up on a farm in Michigan. She graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. She attended University of Michigan and graduated from Ohio State University Phi Beta Kappa. C.K.'s maternal grandparents were M. Louise Davis and Alfred C. Davis. When C.K. was a year old, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was seven that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston. Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Szekely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000-2003). C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store. CANNOTANSWER
|
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985.
|
Louis Székely (; born September 12, 1967), known professionally as Louis C.K. (), is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker. C.K. won three Peabody Awards two Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
C.K. began his career in the 1990s writing for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, and Saturday Night Live. He was also directing surreal short films and directed two features—Tomorrow Night (1998) and Pootie Tang (2001). In 2001, C.K. released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website and became among the first performers to offer direct-to-fan sales of tickets to his stand-up shows and DRM-free video concert downloads via his website. He has released nine comedy albums, often directing and editing his specials as well. He had supporting acting roles in films such as David O. Russell's American Hustle, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (both 2013), and the Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015). C.K. created, directed and starred in Louie, an Emmy Award winning semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series aired from 2010 to 2015 on FX. In 2016, C.K. created and starred in his self-funded web series Horace and Pete. He also co-created the shows Baskets and Better Things for FX and voiced the protagonist Max in the animated film The Secret Life of Pets in the same year.
In 2017, he admitted to several incidents of sexual misconduct following the release of an article in The New York Times. This resulted in widespread criticism and caused his 2017 film I Love You, Daddy to be pulled from distribution prior to its release, and a halt in his stand-up career. In 2018 he returned to stand-up comedy and in 2019 announced an international tour.
In 2020, C.K. released a new comedy special, Sincerely Louis CK, on his website for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination. In 2021 he embarked on an international comedy tour and released a new comedy special Sorry once again on his website.
Early life
Louis Székely was born in Washington, D.C., U.S., on September 12, 1967, the son of software engineer Mary Louise (née Davis) and economist Louis Székely. He has three sisters. His father is of Mexican and Hungarian-Jewish descent. C.K.'s Jewish paternal grandfather, Géza Székely Schweiger, had immigrated from Hungary to Mexico, and to appease his Mexican wife raised Louis in the Catholic faith. C.K.'s mother, an American, was a Catholic with Irish ancestry.
When C.K. was an infant, his family moved to his father's home country of Mexico, where his father had earned a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to graduating from Harvard. C.K.'s first language was Spanish; it was not until after they moved back to the U.S. when he was 7 that he began to learn English. He has said that he has since forgotten much of his Spanish. When C.K. left Mexico with his family, they moved back to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts area, initially for a year in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Upon moving from Mexico to suburban Boston, C.K. wanted to become a writer and comedian, citing George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as some of his influences. When he was 10, his parents divorced. C.K. said that his father was around but he did not see him much and when he remarried, C.K.'s father converted to Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his new wife. C.K. and his three sisters were raised by their single mother in Newton, Massachusetts. The fact that his mother had only "bad" TV shows to view upon returning home from work inspired him to work on television. C.K.'s mother raised her children as Catholic and they attended after-school Catholic class until they completed communion. C.K. has said that his father's whole family still lives in Mexico. C.K.'s paternal uncle Dr. Francisco Székely is an academic and an international consultant on environmental affairs who served as Mexico's Deputy Minister of Environment (2000–2003).
C.K. attended Newton North High School, and graduated in 1985. He graduated with future Friends star Matt LeBlanc. After graduation, C.K. worked as an auto mechanic and at a public access TV cable station in Boston. According to C.K., working in public access TV gave him the tools and technical knowledge to make his short films and later his television shows. "Learning is my favorite thing", he said. He also worked for a time as a cook and in a video store.
Career
1984–1997: Career beginnings
In 1984 at 17, C.K. directed the comedic short film Trash Day. The New York University Tisch School of the Arts showed an interest in him as a filmmaker, but he instead decided to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. C.K.'s first attempt at stand-up was in 1985 at an open mic night at a comedy club in Boston, Massachusetts, during the apex of the comedy boom. He was given five minutes of time, but had only two minutes of material. He was so discouraged by the experience that he did not perform again for two years. As Boston's comedy scene grew, C.K. gradually achieved success, performing alongside acts such as Denis Leary and Lenny Clarke, and eventually he moved up to paid gigs, opening for Jerry Seinfeld and hosting comedy clubs until he moved to Manhattan in 1989. He performed his act on many televised programs, including Evening at the Improv and Star Search. C.K.'s short film Ice Cream (1993), was submitted to the Aspen Shortsfest in 1994.
In 1993, he unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live, although he did later work with Robert Smigel, writing on the TV Funhouse shorts for the program. C.K.'s earliest writing job was for Conan O'Brien on the late-night talk show Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 1994, before briefly writing for Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. C.K. has stated that Conan O'Brien kept C.K. in comedy by hiring him, as he planned to quit comedy the following day if he had not been hired for Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Throughout the spring of 1996, C.K. served as the head writer for The Dana Carvey Show; its writers also included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Charlie Kaufman. It was canceled after seven episodes. In 1996, HBO released his first half-hour comedy special. C.K. appeared several times on the animated show Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
From 1997 to 1999, he wrote for The Chris Rock Show. His work on the show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for writing three times, winning "Best Writing in a Variety or Comedy Series" in 1999. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his work writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He has been quoted as describing his approach to writing as a "deconstruction" that is both painful and frightening.
1998–2004: Focus on filmmaking
In 1998, C.K. wrote and directed the independent black-and-white film Tomorrow Night, which premiered at Sundance, marking his feature film directorial debut after making several shorter films, including six short films for the sketch comedy show Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies (1995) on the Showtime cable network. C.K. self-released Tomorrow Night in 2014. He hosted the PBS show ShortCuts in 1999, which featured independent short films, including some made by C.K. himself. Also that year, C.K. devised and starred in The Filthy Stupid Talent Show, a mock talent show television special. He had an early acting role in the independent comedy Tuna, alongside Nick Offerman, in 2000 and performed on the stand-up showcase series Comedy Central Presents the following year.
C.K. wrote and directed the feature film Pootie Tang (2001), which was adapted from a sketch that was featured on The Chris Rock Show and featured Chris Rock in a supporting role. The film received largely negative reviews from critics, but has become a cult classic; in a half-star review, Roger Ebert declared it a "train wreck" and felt the film was "not in a releasable condition". Though C.K. is credited as the director, he was fired at the end of filming with the film being re-edited by the studio. C.K. has since co-written two screenplays with Rock: Down to Earth (2001) and I Think I Love My Wife (2007). His first comedy album, Live in Houston, was released in 2001. In 2002, he voiced Brendon Small's estranged father, Andrew Small, in the animated sitcom Home Movies. C.K. was among the writing staff of the sketch comedy show Cedric the Entertainer Presents (2002–03).
2005–2009: Lucky Louie and standup breakthrough
In August 2005, C.K. starred in a half-hour HBO special as part of the stand-up series One Night Stand. Inspired by the work ethic of fellow comedian George Carlin, who had committed to dropping all of his existing material and starting over every year, in June 2006, C.K. starred in and wrote Lucky Louie, a sitcom he created. The series premiered on HBO and was videotaped in front of a studio audience; it was HBO's first series in that format. Lucky Louie is described as a bluntly realistic portrayal of family life. HBO canceled the series after its first season. C.K. was also a part of Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour with other comedians in 2007. In 2007, he hosted a three-hour phone-in show on the service at the request of Opie & Anthony, during which he advised callers on their relationship troubles. During an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the show, C.K. repeatedly asked Rumsfeld whether he is in fact a reptilian space alien who "eats Mexican babies". Rumsfeld declined to comment and the video has since gone viral.
He appeared in three films in 2008: Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Diminished Capacity, and Role Models. C.K. launched his first hour-long special, Shameless, in 2007, which aired on HBO and was later released on DVD. In March 2008, he recorded a second hour-long special, Chewed Up, which premiered on Showtime Network on October 4, 2008, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy or Variety Special.
C.K. and his wife Alix Bailey divorced in 2008, with C.K. and Bailey sharing joint custody of their children. In a 2010 interview, C.K. talked about how, after his divorce, he thought, "well, there goes my act." He alluded to the way that his marriage had been central to his act and his life, and he said that it took him approximately a year to realize "I'm accumulating stories here that are worth telling." One element in his preparation for stand-up was training at the same boxing gym as Lowell, Massachusetts fighter Micky Ward, trying to "learn how to ... do the grunt work and the boring, constant training so that you'll be fit enough to take the beating."
A clip from an appearance by C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in October 2008 titled "Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy" became a viral hit on YouTube in 2009, helping his standup career to propel forward.
On April 18, 2009, C.K. recorded a concert film titled Hilarious. Unlike his previous specials—which had all been produced for television networks—Hilarious was produced independently, directed by C.K. himself, and sold to Epix and Comedy Central after it was complete. As a result, it was not released until late 2010. It was published on DVD and CD in 2011. It is the first stand-up comedy film accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. From 2009 to 2012, C.K. played Dave Sanderson, a police officer and ex-boyfriend of Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. He also co-starred in the romantic comedy fantasy film The Invention of Lying, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais, in 2009.
2011–2015: Louie, FX deal and film roles
FX picked up C.K.'s series Louie in August 2009, which C.K. stars in, writes, directs, and edits. The show features stand-up routines blended with segments partially based on his offstage experiences which address his life as a divorced, aging father. The show premiered on June 29, 2010. In season three, episodes dealt respectively with a date with an unstable bookshop clerk (played by Parker Posey); a doomed attempt to replace a retiring David Letterman; an aborted visit to C.K.'s father; and a dream-reality New Year's Eve episode in which C.K. ends up in China. These episodes were ranked in critic Matt Zoller Seitz's favorite 25 comedy episodes of 2012. Seitz called the episode "New Year's Eve" "truly audacious". C.K. has been nominated five times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2011–2015) for his work in Louie, and won two Emmys in 2011 for the Louie episode "Pregnant" and for his special Live at the Beacon Theater.
The show was renewed for a fourth season; with a 19-month hiatus after season 3 to accommodate C.K.'s roles in David O. Russell's American Hustle and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in 2013. During the 2014 Television Critics Association presentations, FX Networks' John Landgraf reported that Louie would return in spring 2015 for a shortened fifth season of seven episodes—compared to the 13 episodes of prior seasons. The fifth season premiered in April 2015 and an announcement said the series would take an "extended hiatus" in August 2015; C.K. stated in January 2016 that he "just doesn't know" whether it would return or not. In November 2017, in the wake of the misconduct allegations against C.K, FX cut ties with the embattled comic and filmmaker, ending their partnership. In 2018, however, FX CEO John Landgraf stated to Variety, “I love ‘Louie’ and I love Louis C.K.'s work and I miss him, and I miss it,” and that "the network is ready to welcome C.K. back and is eager for “Louie” season six".
In 2011, C.K. joined fellow comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais for a discussion of comedy in Talking Funny, a one-hour television special that aired on HBO.
On December 10, 2011, C.K. released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Like Hilarious, it was produced independently and directed by C.K. However, unlike his earlier work, it was distributed digitally on his website, foregoing both physical and broadcast media. C.K. released the special for $5.00 and without DRM, hoping that these factors and the direct relationship between the artist and consumer would effectively deter illegal downloading. At the end of the special, the release of a new album, recorded at Carnegie Hall the previous year, is mentioned. By December 21, 2011, the sales of the special from C.K.'s website had already earned him over $1 million. C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live on November 3, 2012, and was subsequently Primetime Emmy Award-nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.
The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model. On May 11, 2012, C.K. additionally made two audio-only downloads available for $5.00 each: WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall (and the audio version of his first HBO stand-up special, Shameless), as well as an audio-only version of Live at the Beacon Theater. C.K.'s fifth one-hour special, Oh My God, was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, and premiered on HBO April 13, 2013. It was also sold and distributed using the same model as C.K. used for Live at the Beacon Theater.
In 2013, C.K. appeared in critically acclaimed films the first being Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine where he played the romantic interest of Sally Hawkins' character. C.K. originally auditioned for the role that went to Andrew Dice Clay, and Allen offered Louie the role that ended up in the film. Of the experience, C.K. stated, “I had this three-day part and I figured I’m a tourist on this movie. All I want is a little Woody moment to take home with me. It was so fun, and we had lunch, and I thought having lunch with him was my rewarding moment. And then after lunch, we shot one more scene and I got a big laugh on the set, and I thought, that’s my Woody moment".
Later that year, C.K. starred in David O. Russell's black comedy crime film American Hustle, which was released in December 2013. C.K. played the role of FBI supervisor Stoddard Thorsen, the boss of Bradley Cooper's character. The film was a financial and critical hit, earning 10 Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture. C.K. earned a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
C.K.'s production company, Pig Newton, where he works with producer Blair Breard, signed a contract to develop and executive produce pilots for FX Networks in 2013. In January 2014, an announcement said C.K. would produce and co-write a Zach Galifianakis-created comedy pilot for FX Networks. The 10-episode single-camera comedy, titled Baskets, premiered on January 21, 2016. It features Galifianakis as the main character, a struggling clown named Chip Baskets in a pilot episode written by Galifianakis, Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel. C.K. released his sixth one-hour special Live at the Comedy Store to his website in January 2015, which, unlike his past few specials, was recorded at a club, The Comedy Store in West Hollywood. C.K. said he intended the material as an exercise in creating an act that hearkened back to his early days in comedy clubs. The special premiered exclusively on FX on May 28, 2015.
He returned to host Saturday Night Live on March 29, 2014, and May 16, 2015, and received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for both episodes. C.K. also attended the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special, where he was chosen to introduce a montage of the pre-recorded sketches.
In May 2015, it was announced that C.K. would write, direct, and star in the film I'm a Cop, to be produced by Scott Rudin, Dave Becky, and Blair Breard, with a budget of $8 million, although he later canceled the project. C.K. became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden three times in a single tour in 2015. Audio from the tour was released by C.K. on his website as Louis C.K.: Live at Madison Square Garden through the pay what you want model. In November 2015, C.K. co-starred in the biographical drama film Trumbo as a composite character based on five different screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood for their alleged ties to the Communist party during the 1940s.
He executive-produced the pilot for the Amazon Video black comedy series One Mississippi, starring Notaro, in November 2015. It was ordered for a full season by Amazon.
2016: Horace and Pete and continued success
In January 2016 C.K. and actor/comedian Albert Brooks were rumoured to create, write, executive produce, and provide the voices for the two main characters in an animated series pilot for FX. The following January, the series was announced to instead be premiering on TBS in 2018 and titled The Cops, following two Los Angeles patrolmen. On January 30, 2016, he released the first episode of the tragicomic drama series Horace and Pete to his website, without any prior announcements. C.K. directed, wrote, and starred in the series as bar owner Horace, alongside Steve Buscemi, who portrays co-owner Pete. Horace and Pete pioneered the genre of 'sadcom'. James Poniewozik of The New York Times said the series "may best be described as a Cheers spec script by Eugene O'Neill: a snapshot of a family—and a country—suffering a hangover decades in the making." The self-financed series received a significantly positive reaction from critics, who largely focused on the performances of the veteran cast that includes C.K., Buscemi, Edie Falco, Steven Wright, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange and C.K.'s writing. C.K. has expressed his interest in a second season. C.K. next voiced the lead, Max, a Jack Russell Terrier, in the animated comedy film The Secret Life of Pets. The film was co-directed by Chris Renaud of the Despicable Me series, and was released on July 8, 2016. It grossed over $875 million worldwide. C.K. developed the series Better Things with its star Pamela Adlon, who had appeared on Louie. C.K. co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the pilot. The show is about a single working actress mother and her struggles to raise three daughters. It premiered in September 2016 on FX. His stand-up special 2017 was filmed in Washington, D.C. and released on April 4, 2017, through the streaming service Netflix.
Barry Crimmins's stand-up special, Whatever Threatens You, directed and produced by C.K., was released through his website in 2016.
On April 8, 2017, he hosted Saturday Night Live for a fourth time, where he received strong reviews for his opening monologue in which he tackled white privilege, and bits about a racist chicken, and talking animals. A critic from The A.V. Club wrote " no one's better at taking a joke to the edge and tiptoeing nimbly along it". C.K. also honored fellow comedian Don Rickles who died that week, saying during the goodnights portion stating, "I just want to say, Don Rickles was the funniest man in the world and he was also a lovely, beautiful guy. I'll miss him for the rest of my life".
C.K. directed the film I Love You, Daddy in secret, shooting entirely on black and white 35 mm film in June 2017. The film follows a television producer and writer played by C.K. called Glen Topher whose teenage daughter, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is seduced by a much older film director (John Malkovich), causing Topher to become disconcerted. The film also features Charlie Day, Adlon, Rose Byrne, Edie Falco and Helen Hunt. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival in September, whereupon The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film a four-star review, calling it a "very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channeling his masterpiece Manhattan."
2017: Sexual misconduct revelations
In 2015, rumors about C.K.'s behavior towards women in his professional life began to appear on various websites, starting with comedian Roseanne Barr, who told The Daily Beast in an interview that she had heard stories of C.K., "locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers". Barr added in a subsequent tweet that she had no idea if C.K. was a sexual offender or not, but said that given the number of accusations, he should address the rumors. Two years later, in a September 2017 Vanity Fair interview, comedian Tig Notaro cut ties with C.K., a one-time collaborator and producer on her show One Mississippi, saying that he should address the rumors of sexual impropriety, and alluding to an unspecified "incident" between herself and C.K. As he had repeatedly in the past, C.K. denied the allegations in a September 2017 New York Times interview, saying "They're rumors, that's all that is... I don't think talking about that stuff in the press... is a good idea."
On November 9, 2017, The Orchard, distributor of C.K.'s upcoming film I Love You, Daddy, canceled the New York premiere of the film due to "unexpected circumstances", while a scheduled appearance by C.K. on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert promoting the movie was also canceled. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article claiming that a very damaging story on the comedian was about to be published in the New York Times, and the premiere was canceled to mitigate the damage. Later that day, the Times published allegations of sexual misconduct from five women against C.K. The women who spoke out in the article included comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who claimed that C.K. had invited them to his hotel room in 2002 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where he asked them if he could take out his penis. The two women assumed he was joking, but C.K. masturbated to completion in front of them. They relayed the incident to ImprovOlympics founder Charna Halpern. The comedian Rebecca Corry described that, on the set of a television pilot in 2005, she reported an incident to the show's producers where C.K. offered to masturbate in front of her, and no action was taken. Comedian Abby Schachner said that during a 2003 telephone conversation, C.K. began speaking about his sexual fantasies and masturbating. Schachner felt C.K.'s conduct was "unprofessional and inappropriate" given that she was inviting him as an established comedian to one of her comedy shows, and that C.K. was working in a writers room with Schachner's then-boyfriend. Schachner said that C.K. apologized for his past behavior several years later.
C.K. initially declined to answer the allegations in public. In a subsequent statement on November 10, after the Times article, C.K. admitted to behavior that he initially thought "was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first", and went on to express remorse, stating, "the power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly."
After C.K. exposed himself to Goodman and Wolov, his manager, Dave Becky, made it known to theirs that they might suffer professional consequences if they continued talking about the incident. Becky initially denied making any threats but later apologized for statements that he said could have been perceived as threats. He claimed to have no knowledge of any other incidents. He dropped C.K. as a client and apologized for a perceived "cover up". In subsequent days, Pamela Adlon and John Mulaney fired Becky as a manager for his role in the cover up. Separately, the comedian and journalist Megan Koester claims to have been threatened by Just for Laughs president Dave Hills when she asked several prominent comedians about the allegations at the festival in 2015.
Consequences
In the wake of the scandal, C.K. suffered severe repercussions, stating in 2018 that the fallout had taken him through "hell and back" and cost him approximately $35 million in lost income. The Orchard announced it would not distribute the film I Love You, Daddy, and co-stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Charlie Day said they would not participate in the film's promotion. FX Networks announced it was cutting ties with C.K., and Netflix announced that it would not be moving forward with a second planned stand-up special featuring the comedian. HBO dropped C.K.'s appearance on an upcoming Night of Too Many Stars television special and removed his content from their on-demand services. TBS suspended production of, and eventually scrapped, its animated series The Cops. Illumination, about to produce the animated children's film The Secret Life of Pets 2 in which C.K. was to reprise his starring role from the previous film, terminated their relationship with him and hired Patton Oswalt as his replacement. The Disney Channel also removed C.K. from reruns of Gravity Falls, redubbing his character's voice with series creator Alex Hirsch.
2018–2020: Return to stand-up comedy
On August 26, 2018, C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, New York. It was reported that he received an ovation from the audience, and performed a typical set making no reference to the sexual controversy.
His return to stand-up comedy was criticized by comedians including Aparna Nancherla, Ian Karmel, Allie Goertz, and Judd Apatow as being premature, whereas Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Michael Che, Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Judy Gold, Marlon Wayans, Joe Rogan, and Kurt Metzger supported C.K.'s right to continue standup. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld also supported C.K.'s return to standup but opined that the public may have felt that C.K. had not owned up to his actions enough, saying in October 2018, "We know the routine: The person does something wrong. The person's humiliated. They're exiled. They suffer, we want them to suffer. We love the tumble, we love the crash and bang of the fall. And then we love the crawl-back. The grovel. Are you going to grovel? How long are you going to grovel?" Seinfeld added, "We, the court of public opinion, decided if he's going to come back, he'd better show a lot of pain. Because he denied (the public) that." Edie Falco, who starred in C.K.'s Horace and Pete and I Love You, Daddy, expressed her hope that he would receive a second chance saying: "He's someone who admitted that he did what he was accused of doing and admitted that it wasn't right" and that "people who are committed to becoming aware of what they've done and changing, they can be our strongest proponents in an issue like this."
On December 31, 2018, an audience member secretly recorded C.K. working out new material and posted it online which drew media controversy. Included in his set, were jokes about school shootings which drew condemnation from Parkland survivors and a divided reaction from fellow comedians. Ricky Gervais defended C.K.'s jokes saying "[C.K.'s] got nothing against those [Parkland] kids. It was him pretending to be angry for comedy."
In October 2019, C.K. announced in an e-mail to subscribers of his website an international tour of his new material. Following the leak of his new material in December 2018, his future shows would require audience members to lock cell phones and other devices in Yondr cases which has become the norm with comedians Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, and Aziz Ansari using them as well. Canadian comedian Mark Breslin and owner of Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk's defended his decision to book C.K. again in Toronto, citing sold out tickets for five shows and a lack of controversy.
In January 2020, C.K. performed an unannounced set, receiving a standing ovation for the eighth annual benefit show for late comedian Patrice O'Neal, a yearly benefit of which comedian Bill Burr is the organizer.
Beginning in March 2020, most of C.K.'s shows were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Sincerely Louis C.K.
On April 4, 2020, C.K. self-released a new stand-up special entitled Sincerely Louis C.K. through his website without advance notice. In the credits, C.K. thanked various people, including comedians Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald and Joe Rogan, and his girlfriend Blanche Gardin, and dedicated the special to his mother who died in 2019. The special drew a divided response from audiences, including fellow comedian Amy Schumer, who said, "I laughed at a lot of it. But it's hard to not think of what he has done, what he has and hasn't learned, but I definitely laughed."
2020–present: COVID-19 and stand-up tour
In July 2020, C.K. released an audio series of conversations between himself and girlfriend Blanche Gardin titled Long Distance Relationship. Proceeds would go toward the Fistula Foundation and French charity Fondation Abbé Pierre.
On August 4, 2020, C.K. was invited by his longtime friend Dave Chappelle to join him in an instalment of his standup series "An Intimate Socially Distanced Affair" at the Wirrig Pavilion in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Photos emerged from the event of C.K. with Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Michelle Wolf, Tiffany Haddish and Common.
In October 2020, C.K. appeared in a docu-series titled The Comedy Store about the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name, directed by Mike Binder.
In May 2021, following the easing of restrictions in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic, C.K. made an unannounced stop at the Village Underground. He then announced upcoming tour-dates for summer 2021 in Atlanta, Nashville and Minneapolis.
In August 2021, C.K. announced a tour of the United States in the year 2021 and international dates for the year 2022. American dates include two nights at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden. The tour rescheduled dates canceled due to COVID-19, acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and safety concerns.
In November 2021, C.K. was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his special Sincerely, Louis C.K.
On The Joe Rogan Experience in November 2021, comedian Shane Gillis revealed that C.K. had filmed a new special at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.
Sorry
On 18 December 2021 C.K. announced the release of a new stand-up comedy special, titled Sorry. The special was released for sale through his website, similar to other releases he has done in the past. He also offered a bundling of previous specials for a larger fee.
Influences
C.K. has cited many comedians who have had an influence on him, including George Carlin, Woody Allen, Larry David, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby.
Ticketing innovation
C.K. innovated direct-to-consumer distribution in 2001 when he released his debut comedy album, Live in Houston, directly through his website. He became one of the first performers to use his website to offer direct-to-fan ticket sales for his shows, as well as DRM-free video concert downloads. In this way, C.K. sold tickets for his stand-up tour, circumventing large ticket outlets, bypassing their overhead and the venues they control. C.K. has said the ticket outlets create barriers to consumers, whereas direct distribution is easy—and has effectively "closed the gap between how easy it was to steal it [versus] how easy it was to buy it". The success of the special prompted other comedians, including Jim Gaffigan, Joe Rogan, and Aziz Ansari, to release their own specials with a similar business model.
Personal life
Marriage and relationships
C.K. married artist Alix Bailey in 1995. Together, they have two daughters: Katherine "Kitty" Szekely (b. 2002) and Mary Louise Szekely (b. 2005). The couple divorced in 2008. C.K.'s mother, Mary Louise Szekely, died on June 3, 2019.
C.K. had a brief relationship with musician Fiona Apple.
C.K. confirmed he was dating Blanche Gardin in 2018.
Political views
About political partisanship, C.K. stated, "Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue."
In March 2016, C.K. sent an email to those subscribed to his mailing list which was critical of the 2016 presidential race. C.K. stated he hoped for a conservative president but likened Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He labeled Trump an "insane bigot" also adding, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man." C.K. later referred to the e-mail as "irrational". But he clarified to Stephen Colbert in April 2017 that Trump is not "some new kind of evil" but rather "a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit", to boisterous approving applause from the Late Show audience.
In March 2020, C.K. donated to the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. However, the campaign said that it has refunded the $2,800 donation from C.K. Neither Biden nor C.K. has released statements regarding the matter.
Philanthropy
In 2011, by selling Live at the Beacon Theater on his website, C.K. earned a "million dollars in a matter of days, half of which he [gave] away to his staff and charities." Recipients included the Fistula Foundation, Green Chimneys, the Pablove Foundation, Charity: Water, and Kiva.
In 2016, he selected the Fistula Foundation as the beneficiary of his Jeopardy! Power Players Week appearance, and won $50,000 for the charity.
In April 2020, C.K. donated $30,000 to the wait staff at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as part of a GoFundMe program called "Tip Your Wait Staff".
Religion
Louis C.K. was raised Catholic and has identified as an agnostic.
Filmography
Louis C.K. is known as a writer, director, producer and actor who has acted in many television series, including Lucky Louie (2006), Louie (2010–2015) and Horace and Pete (2016). He has hosted Saturday Night Live five times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He has also appeared in television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. C.K. has also starred in a number of films such as Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, David O. Russell's American Hustle (both 2013) and Jay Roach's Hollywood blacklist drama Trumbo (2015).
Comedy releases
Specials and albums
Appearances
Awards and nominations
For his work performing stand-up, writing, acting, directing, producing and editing, C.K. has received several awards and nominations. Among them are 39 Emmy Award nominations, with six wins. C.K. has won two Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album for Hilarious in 2011, and Live at Madison Square Garden in 2015. C.K. has also been nominated for two Golden Globes, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards winning one with the ensemble cast of American Hustle in 2013. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards in the area of Excellence in Entertainment for his shows, Louie, Better Things, and Horace and Pete. For his work on Louie C.K. earned three Writers Guild of America Awards alongside his writing partner Pamela Adlon.
Notes
References
External links
1967 births
Living people
20th-century American comedians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American comedians
21st-century American male actors
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
Hispanic and Latino American male actors
Hispanic and Latino American writers
Actors from Newton, Massachusetts
American agnostics
American comedy writers
American male comedians
American male comedy actors
American male film actors
American male screenwriters
American male television actors
American male television writers
American male voice actors
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Indigenous Mexican descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Mexican-Jewish descent
American people of Spanish descent
American philanthropists
American stand-up comedians
American television directors
American television editors
American television writers
American writers of Mexican descent
Comedians from Massachusetts
Comedians from Washington, D.C.
Former Roman Catholics
Grammy Award winners
Kerrang! Awards winners
Male actors from Massachusetts
Male actors from Mexico City
Male actors from Washington, D.C.
Newton North High School alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Screenwriters from Massachusetts
Screenwriters from Washington, D.C.
Showrunners
Television producers from Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers Guild of America Award winners
| true |
[
"William Arthur Brownell (May 19, 1895 – May 28, 1977) was an American educational psychologist.\n\nEarly life \nBrownell was born in Smethport, Pennsylvania on May 19, 1895. He graduated from Allegheny College in 1917. He received a Ph.D. in 1926 from the University of Chicago.\n\nAcademic career \nFrom 1930 to 1949 he was a professor of educational psychology at Duke University where he did his most important research.\n\nFrom 1950 to his retirement in 1962 he was the Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Education.\n\nIn 1965 he received the E. L. Thorndike Award.\n\nPersonal life \nHe married Kathryn K. (1903-2001) and they had at least one child.\n\nReferences \n\nAmerican psychologists\n1895 births\n1977 deaths\nUniversity of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Education faculty\nDuke University faculty\n20th-century psychologists",
"Catharine R. Stimpson (born June 4, 1936 in Bellingham, Washington) is a feminist scholar, University Professor, professor of English, and dean emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University.\n\nAcademic career\nStimpson did her undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr College and earned graduate degrees from Cambridge University and Columbia University. She was the founding editor in 1975 of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.\n\nStimpson began her academic career at Barnard College, where she was founding director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women in 1971. In 1980, she became Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she also led the Institute for Research on Women, was Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education, and University Professor. After a leave from Rutgers to serve as Director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, she became University Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University in 1998. In 2010, she became Dean Emerita at NYU, where she has appointments in the Department of English, the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, and the Law School.\n\nIn 1990, she was president of the Modern Language Association and in 1999-2000 she was president of the Association of Graduate Schools of the Association of American Universities.\n\nMacArthur Fellows\nAs director of the MacArthur Fellows Program from 1993 to 1997, Stimpson helped the program move from recognizing already established scholars to the more contemporary form of today.\n\nBibliography\nIn addition to being the founding editor of Signs, Stimpson has written two books, edited seven books, and published over 150 monographs, essays, stories, and reviews.\n\nReferences\n\n1936 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Bellingham, Washington\nFeminist studies scholars\nBryn Mawr College alumni\nColumbia University alumni\nBarnard College faculty\nAlumni of the University of Cambridge\nRutgers University faculty\nNew York University faculty"
] |
[
"William Beveridge",
"Life and career"
] |
C_237643feedba46959fb07be350fab269_1
|
What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?
| 1 |
What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?
|
William Beveridge
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food. In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer.
|
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Early life and education
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
Life and career
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Wartime work
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.
The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.
Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.
Later career
Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.
Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.
In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.
Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.
In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.
Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House. ... His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect. ... The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households. For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents. ... The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists." 'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.
Personal life
Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.
He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".
Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.
In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.
University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.
Works
Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
The Price of Peace, 1945.
Power and Influence, 1953.
"India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.
See also
Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Resources
Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
References
Further reading
Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp 211–28.
Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online
Primary sources
Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).
External links
Sir William Beveridge Foundation
Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
Full text of the report
BBC information
BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives
1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
| true |
[
"A Beveridge curve, or UV curve, is a graphical representation of the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate, the number of unfilled jobs expressed as a proportion of the labour force. It typically has vacancies on the vertical axis and unemployment on the horizontal. The curve, named after William Beveridge, is hyperbolic-shaped and slopes downward, as a higher rate of unemployment normally occurs with a lower rate of vacancies. If it moves outward over time, a given level of vacancies would be associated with higher and higher levels of unemployment, which would imply decreasing efficiency in the labour market. Inefficient labour markets are caused by mismatches between available jobs and the unemployed and an immobile labour force.\n\nThe position on the curve can indicate the current state of the economy in the business cycle. For example, recessionary periods are indicated by high unemployment and low vacancies, corresponding to a position on the lower side of the 45° line, and high vacancies and low unemployment indicate the expansionary periods on the upper side of the 45° line.\n\nIn the United States, following the Great Recession, there was a marked shift in the Beveridge curve. A 2012 International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the shift can be explained in part by \"extended unemployment insurance benefits\" and \"skill mismatch\" between unemployment and vacancies.\n\nHistory\nThe Beveridge curve, or UV curve, was developed in 1958 by Christopher Dow and Leslie Arthur Dicks-Mireaux. They were interested in measuring excess demand in the goods market for the guidance of Keynesian fiscal policies and took British data on vacancies and unemployment in the labour market as a proxy, since excess demand is unobservable. By 1958, they had 12 years of data available since the British government had started collecting data on unfilled vacancies from notification at labour exchanges in 1946. Dow and Dicks-Mireaux presented the unemployment and vacancy data in an unemployment-vacancy (UV) space and derived an idealised UV-curve as a rectangular hyperbola after they had connected successive observations. The UV curve, or Beveridge curve, enabled economists to use an analytical method, later known as UV-analysis, to decompose unemployment into different types of unemployment: deficient-demand (or cyclical) unemployment and structural unemployment. In the first half of the 1970s, that method was refined by economists of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), in London, so that a classification arose that corresponded to the 'traditional' classification: a division of unemployment into frictional, structural and deficient demand unemployment, according to a 1976 analysis. Both the Beveridge curve and the Phillips curve bear implicit macroeconomic notions of equilibrium in markets, but the notions are inconsistent and conflicting. Most likely, because the curve enabled economists to analyze many of the problems that Beveridge had addressed, like mismatch between unemployment and vacancies, at aggregate level and industry levels and trend v. cyclical changes and measurement problems of vacancies, the curve was named in the 1980s after William Beveridge, who never drew the curve, and the exact origin of the name remains obscure.\n\nMovements\nThe Beveridge Curve can move for the following reasons:\n\n The matching process will determine how efficiently workers find new jobs. Improvements in the matching system would shift the curve towards the origin, because an efficient matching process will find jobs faster, filling vacancies and employing the unemployed. Improvements can be made by increasing the mobility of labour, the introduction of agencies, such as job centres, and lower rates of unionisation, according to a 2001 article on OECD that compared unemployment and wages in the OECD from the 1960s to the 1990s. \nSkills mismatches occur when changes in the skills employers want differ from the available skills in the labour pool. Greater mismatches would shift the Beveridge curve outward. If that were the driving factor behind the shift, one would expect to also see employers bid up wages for the few candidates who were desirable. Although the US Beveridge curve shifted outward in the 2010–2012 period, wages did not increase.\n Labour force participation rate: as the number looking for jobs increases relative to the total population, the unemployment rate increases, shifting the curve outwards from the origin. Labour force participation can increase due to changes in education, gender roles, population age and immigration.\n Long-term unemployment will push the curve outward from the origin, which could be caused by deterioration of human capital or a negative perception of the unemployed by the potential employers.\nFrictional unemployment: a decrease in frictions would reduce the number of firms searching for employees and the number of unemployed searching for jobs. That would shift the curve towards the origin. Frictional unemployment is caused by job losses, resignations and job creation.\nEconomic and policy uncertainty may cause employers to hold vacancies open longer in the search for the \"perfect candidate\", particularly when there is high unemployment with a large number of candidates from which to choose. More uncertainty would tend to shift the curve outward.\nSkill shortages should not be confused with \"labour shortages\", which identify an objective lack of workers in the market, independently of their skills, and it may arise because of limited geographical mobility, ageing populations or a labour market approaching full employment during an economic boom. Along with labour surpluses, labour shortages are one of the most traditional examples of labour market imbalances. What distinguishes an objective shortage of labour from a skill-related shortage (i.e. a special case of skill mismatch) is just the presence of a pool of unemployed individuals (non-discouraged job seekers) willing to take up jobs in the labour market considered at the ongoing rate. Nevertheless, even in presence of unemployment and assuming that there is adequate demand for labour in the market, it could still be difficult to point to a skill shortage for at least two reasons: if whether the unemployment we observe is frictional (just a short-term consequence of costly \"search\"), cyclical (caused by the business cycle) or structural cannot be established or if whether the position offered is accessible and/or attractive (such as whether or not the wage posted is competitive or at least rising with respect to other segments of the market that are not reporting unmet labour demands) cannot be established. \nIn addition, skill shortages may be caused by both \"horizontal\" skill mismatch, when workers have qualifications/skills which are different than the one required by the firms, or by \"vertical\" skill mismatch, when workers' skills and qualifications are lower levels than what firms require. In the literature, scholars have also referred to skill mismatch and sometimes even to skill shortages to define a situation of the skills of the employed workers and those required by being jobs were different. To avoid any possible confusion, that form of mismatch affecting only employed individuals will be referred as \"on-the-job\" mismatch, in the more general case of workers being both over and under-skilled for their jobs (vertical on-the-job mismatch) or have different skills/qualifications (horizontal on-the-job mismatch) and as skill gap to refer to employed workers whose skills are lower than those required by their jobs. It follows that skill mismatch, as it is defined here, can result in the occurrence of both skill shortages and on-the-job mismatches (both vertical and horizontal).\n\nEconomists generally believe that labour markets adjust to such imbalances, especially over time, but it is also possible for such mismatches to persist for many years or decades. In such instances, adverse equilibria, characterized by more structural unemployment, long-term unfilled vacancies and/or lower labour force participation may arise, and employers may eventually be forced to hire workers who possess lower or just different skills, giving place to the mismatch \"on the job\". Public policy interventions to change or improve the match of workers to employers might be appropriate in such cases.\n\nIn the United States, following the Great Recession, there was a marked shift in the Beveridge curve. A 2012 International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the shift can be explained in part by \"extended unemployment insurance benefits\" and \"skill mismatch\" between unemployment and vacancies.\n\nSee also\n Labour economics\n Search theory\n Matching theory\n Types of unemployment\n Phillips curve\n Involuntary unemployment\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\nExternal links\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\nEconomics curves",
"Dùn an Achaidh, sometimes Anglicised as Dun Acha, is a dun located near the village of Acha on the Inner Hebridean island of Coll. It is considered the best preserved dun on the island. The site of Dùn an Achaidh is located at . According to local tradition, the dun was the stronghold of, and named after, the son of a Norse king. The early 20th century antiquary Erskine Beveridge considered it as one of the four most interesting fortifications on Coll (along with Dùn Anlaimh, Dùn Dubh, and Dùn Morbhaidh).\n\nEtymology\n\nDun an Achaidh takes its name from the Scottish Gaelic An t-Achadh, which translates into English as \"the field\".\n\nAccording to the early 20th century antiquary Erskine Beveridge, the dun was known in local tradition by the Scottish Gaelic name, Dun Bhorlum mhic Anlaimh righ Lochlinn (see Lochlann). He gave two translations for this: \"the fort of ridge of the son of Olaf, King of Norway\"; or \"the fort of Borlum, son of Olaf, King of Norway\". Beveridge noted that borlum is an old Gaelic word meaning \"ridge\"; and that this thoroughly described the site of Dùn an Achaidh. According to Rev. Dugald MacEchern, borlum means \"board-land\", which is \"the home farm of a residence or mansion\". MacEchern also noted that the locals considered Borlum to be a personal name.\n\nLocation and description\nDùn an Achaidh is located about south-west of Acha Mill on Coll. Of all the duns on Coll, it is the second furthest from the shore (the dun atop Druim an Airidh Fhada being furthest). Dùn an Achaidh sits atop a rocky ridge which is high above the surrounding land which is drained by Allt a' Mhuilinn (translates into English as \"the stream of the mill\"). Dùn an Achaidh is situated about south of the crannog, Dùn Anlaimh.\n\nRuins and archaeological finds\n\nThe wall of the dun is considered to have originally been about thick. It runs along a ridge on the ridge and encloses an area of , from north-east to south-west, by a maximum of . An entrance is located on the north-east end of the dun. The approach to this entrance is protected by a wall which lies about below the summit area. This wall measures, in area, ; and is made of large boulders.\n\nThere have been several archaeological finds at the site; including decorated pottery, a slate whorl, and a stone pounder. These finds are now located in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland.\n\nHistory\n\nBeveridge suggested that it was very likely that several of the duns of Coll, and the nearby island of Tiree, were occupied by the Norse during the Viking Age. He noted that the names that some of them bear; and in the cases of Dùn an Achaidh and nearby Dùn Anlaimh, the local traditions would also seem to confirm this.\n\nIn 1587, atrocities committed between warring west highland clans had escalated to such an extent that the Scottish parliament devised what is known as the General Band, in an effort to quell hostilities. The band, or bond, was signed by landowners throughout the Scottish highlands, borders and the islands. The signing chiefs and landowners were required to come up with sureties equal to their wealth and lands for the peaceful conduct of their followers and those who lived upon their lands. One of the lists drawn up was titled \"The roll of the names of the landislordis and baillies of landis in the hielandis an isles, quhair brokin men hes duelt and presentlie duellis\". The laird of Coll (Hector Maclean of Coll) was one of the chiefs listed on this roll. 'Broken men' were generally men who had no chief and who were often outlaws. Beveridge wrote that these men adopted \"the Viking principle of living at the expense of those who were weaker than themselves\". Beveridge proposed that the 'broken men' on Coll, mentioned in 1587, would have likely dwelt in the more remote areas on the island; and that the old duns would have offered such men a certain amount of defensive security. He concluded that there was no doubt that some of the duns on Coll were inhabited well within historic times.\n\nBeveridge wrote that it was said, locally on Coll, that Samuel Johnson visited Dùn an Achaidh during his tour of the Hebrides. However, Beveridge noted neither Johnson, nor James Boswell, made mention of visiting any of the duns on the island.\n\nTraditions associated with Dùn an Achaidh\n\nBeveridge stated that according to local tradition the dun was the stronghold of a Norseman, named as the son of a king named Anlaimh (Olaf). The story was that the local islanders revolted under his tyranny and attacked the dun at night; setting fire to it and routed the Norse occupiers. Beveridge noted that the tradition of setting fire to the dun seemed to have been validated by the evidence of fire still visible on the dun's foundations (evidence which Beveridge came across before knowing the local legend).\n\nIn the early 20th century, Rev. Dugald MacEchern detailed a tradition concerning Dùn an Achaidh.\n\nSee also\nDùn Anlaimh, another dun on Coll traditionally linked to an Amlamh, or Olaf\n\nReferences\n\nArchaeological sites in the Northern Inner Hebrides\nColl\nFormer populated places in Scotland\nFortifications in Scotland\nScheduled monuments in Scotland"
] |
[
"William Beveridge",
"Life and career",
"What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?",
"After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer."
] |
C_237643feedba46959fb07be350fab269_1
|
Where did he work as a lawyer?
| 2 |
Where did William Beveridge work as a lawyer?
|
William Beveridge
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food. In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
|
worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London.
|
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Early life and education
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
Life and career
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Wartime work
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.
The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.
Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.
Later career
Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.
Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.
In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.
Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.
In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.
Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House. ... His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect. ... The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households. For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents. ... The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists." 'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.
Personal life
Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.
He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".
Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.
In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.
University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.
Works
Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
The Price of Peace, 1945.
Power and Influence, 1953.
"India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.
See also
Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Resources
Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
References
Further reading
Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp 211–28.
Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online
Primary sources
Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).
External links
Sir William Beveridge Foundation
Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
Full text of the report
BBC information
BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives
1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
| true |
[
"Everett Lane Weaver (1901 - 1971) was a Canadian politician, who served on Toronto City Council and in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.\n\nA lawyer, he was first elected to city council in the 1947 municipal election, and served for three years as councillor for Ward 2 (Cabbagetown and Rosedale). He was elected to the provincial legislature in the 1951 election, representing the district of St. David as a member of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. He served until 1955, and did not stand for re-election in the 1955 election.\n\nHe returned to his work as a lawyer, and was appointed as a county court judge in 1958. As a judge, he was most noted for his ruling in a 1964 trial that the novel Fanny Hill was obscene under the Criminal Code.\n\nHe died in 1971.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n1901 births\n1971 deaths\nToronto city councillors\nProgressive Conservative Party of Ontario MPPs\nJudges in Ontario\nLawyers in Ontario\nPeople from Cambridge, Ontario",
"John W. Connolly (July 4, 1911July 11, 1981) was the 46th Lieutenant Governor of Michigan.\n\nEarly life \nConnolly was born in Detroit, Michigan on July 4, 1911. Connolly graduated from Georgetown University Law School in 1936. In 1937, he began work as a lawyer.\n\nMilitary career \nIn 1942, Connolly joined the United States Naval Reserve, where he served until 1946. In the service, he earned the rank of Senior Grade Lieutenant. His work as a lawyer was interrupted by his military service, and he returned to working as a lawyer afterwards.\n\nPolitical career \nIn 1949, Connolly was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor of Michigan, as running mate to G. Mennen Williams. At the end of his term, in 1950, he sought re-election unsuccessfully, and tried again in 1952. Connolly ran for circuit judge in Michigan 3rd Circuit in 1964 and 1966, both runs unsuccessful.\n\nPersonal life \nConnolly was a member of both Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. Connolly was Catholic.\n\nDeath \nConnolly died on July 11, 1981 in Detroit.\n\nReferences \n\n1911 births\n1981 deaths\nMilitary personnel from Detroit\nUnited States Navy personnel of World War II\nMichigan lawyers\nMichigan Democrats\nCatholics from Michigan\nPoliticians from Detroit\nLieutenant Governors of Michigan\nGeorgetown University Law Center alumni\n20th-century American politicians\n20th-century American lawyers"
] |
[
"William Beveridge",
"Life and career",
"What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?",
"After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer.",
"Where did he work as a lawyer?",
"worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London."
] |
C_237643feedba46959fb07be350fab269_1
|
What year did he work at Toynbee Hall?
| 3 |
What year did William Beveridge work at Toynbee Hall?
|
William Beveridge
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food. In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
|
1903
|
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Early life and education
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
Life and career
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Wartime work
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.
The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.
Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.
Later career
Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.
Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.
In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.
Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.
In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.
Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House. ... His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect. ... The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households. For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents. ... The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists." 'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.
Personal life
Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.
He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".
Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.
In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.
University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.
Works
Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
The Price of Peace, 1945.
Power and Influence, 1953.
"India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.
See also
Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Resources
Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
References
Further reading
Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp 211–28.
Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online
Primary sources
Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).
External links
Sir William Beveridge Foundation
Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
Full text of the report
BBC information
BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives
1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
| true |
[
"Walter Birmingham (January 4, 1913 - August 16, 2004) was an educationist and economist who served as the warden of Toynbee Hall. He also worked on economic planning for West Africa in the post-colonial era.\n\nEarly life \nBirmingham was born in Firozpur, India, in 1913.\n\nHe took night classes at the London School of Economics, obtaining a degree in economics.\n\nCareer \nBirmingham taught at several British, African, and American universities and was involved in economic development planning for West Africa.\n\nHe was professor of economics at the University of Lesotho.\n\nToynbee Hall \nIn 1964, Birmingham was appointed warden of the Victorian charity Toynbee Hall, which had fallen on hard times.\n\nSoon after taking post, he took on the disgraced former government minister John Profumo as a volunteer. Profumo would continue to support Toynbee Hall for decades, eventually becoming chairman of the charity.\n\nPersonal life \nHe married twice with a son and a daughter from his first marriage and two sons and one daughter from the second.\n\nA sculpture of Birmingham by Betty Jukes is housed at Toynbee Hall.\n\nReferences\n\n1913 births\n2004 deaths",
"Stepney Children's Fund is a British children's charity. The fund was the brainchild in 1980 of Toynbee Hall Warden, Donald Piers Chesworth OBE, and a Roland House then later Toynbee Hall Resident, Bob Le Vaillant. At the time, Bob Le Vaillant was a serving Army Warrant Officer in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. He was living in the East End and working off duty as a Scout Leader (later Scout District Commissioner for Tower Hamlets and Development Commissioner for Central London) with Scout Groups at the East End Methodist Mission and Toynbee Hall.\n\nThe Fund was constituted at Toynbee Hall on 19 September 1982. Trustees were: Mrs Ann Crisp, wife of Toynbee Hall Deputy Warden, John Crisp; Mr John Crisp, Mrs Freny Kapadia (Toynbee Hall Resident); Mr Robert (Bob) Le Vaillant (Toynbee Hall Resident); and Mr Derek Noblett (Police Constable, H District Metropolitan Police Youth & Community Section).\n\nThe objects of the Fund were to \"assist families which include children who have qualified for holidays through the Stepney Committee of the Children's Country Holidays Fund (CCHF), viz.,needy children of all races, colours and creeds aged between five and thirteen (five and twelve in the case of girls), whether or not such holidays have been provided.\" The Fund had power to raise funds and spend them on activities including outings, visits, parties, holidays, camps, etc. The Fund shared Toynbee Hall's Charity Registration 211850 and the Fund's accounts were audited and incorporated in Toynbee Hall's main accounts.\n\nIn 1986 on Bob Le Vaillant's retirement from the Forces and with a pledge by British Petroleum (BP) of salary funding for a Director, Toynbee Hall appointed Bob Le Vaillant to set up and run a Children's Department. The department effectively absorbed Stepney Children's Fund work but nevertheless continued using the Fund's name as it was well-established and respected especially in areas of the countryside where 'Stepney' children camped or were sent on holidays.\n\nA number of projects were established and developed in partnership with national youth organisations, Metropolitan Police, local schools and caring agencies. Projects included Tower Hamlets/Central London County Scoutreach, Youth Outreach Special Summer Camps and Schoolchildren’s Day Camps, Youth Crime Diversion Befriending Scheme, Parent’s Support, Young Leader Training and Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and a national programme of social awareness lectures, fundraising and volunteer recruitment.\n\nIn the mid 1980s and on the invitation and sponsorship and full involvement of Christopher James, 5th Baron Northbourne, who later became the Fund's Chairman and a Toynbee Hall Trustee, Bob Le Vaillant set up a programme of Special Summer Camps running each year on the Northbourne Estate in Betteshanger. The camps were based on the principles of the Scout Association's 'Scoutreach' Development Project which Bob had already trialed in partnership mainly with Scouts in Hay-on-Wye. Activities relied almost wholly on volunteer leadership which required young men and women to be recruited throughout UK and overseas, as well as through the home-grown 'Young Leader' Scheme. The Summer Camps continued until early 2000 when Bob Le Vaillant who was additionally Toynbee Hall Deputy Warden stepped down from heading the Children's Services and took a greater part in the central reorganisation of Toynbee Hall.\n\nIn 2000, Bob and his wife were in the process of adopting 3 children. Bob retired from Toynbee Hall in 2005 and moved with his family to Kent. The final edition of Stepney Children's Fund Annual Report \"Who Cares?\" was published in the Winter of 2002.\n\nReferences\n\nTHE FORCE OF TRADITION AT TOYNBEE HALL CULTURE AND DEEP STRUCTURE IN ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE, Carl Milofsky & Albert Hunter, Bucknell University, USA, 1995\nSettlements, Social Change & Community Action. Good Neighbours, Ruth Gilchrist & Tony Jeffs, Jessica Kingsley, London & Philadelphia, 2001, p. 117-118\nEscape From The East End, Andrew Tyler, The Independent Magazine, 3 November 1990\nStepney in the right direction, John O’Leary, The Times, 26 May 2000\nDetour Around A Criminal Life, Helen Craig, Times Educational Supplement, 24 March 1995\nPACK MENTALITY, Emma Brooker, The Times, 6 November 1993\nBoys in the wood, Reva Klein, Times Educational Supplement, 30 August 1996\nGuiding in Action, Guiding Magazine, September 1992, November 1992, September 1997\nOur wild nights out with the Duke, Wendy Wallace, Times Educational Supplement, 12 March 1999\nONE STEP REMOVED, Scouting Magazine, October 1991\nA toe in the water, Scouting Magazine, February 1994\nHoliday crime ‘kneejerk’ condemned, Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, 13 August 1994\nWelcome Break from Life, Mike Harrison, Kent Messenger, 2 September 1994\nTHE NEW SAVAGES, Keith Dovkants, London Voice, 3 April 1995\nDOUBLE LIVES Tough Justice, Tim Harrison, The Magistrate, October 1999\nTying the knot, Nora Warner, Guiding Magazine, September 1991\nMother Country, Guiding Magazine, October 1998\nScouts face crisis of confidence, Jonathan Green, The Big Issue, 19 December 1994\nTelevision Documentary: THE HUMAN FACTOR. First You've Got To Like them, Peter Williams, TVS, 1991\n\nCharities based in London\n1982 establishments in England\nChildren's charities based in the United Kingdom"
] |
[
"William Beveridge",
"Life and career",
"What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?",
"After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer.",
"Where did he work as a lawyer?",
"worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London.",
"What year did he work at Toynbee Hall?",
"1903"
] |
C_237643feedba46959fb07be350fab269_1
|
Do we know what he worked on while at Toynbee hall?
| 4 |
Do we know what William Beveridge worked on while at Toynbee hall?
|
William Beveridge
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food. In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
|
becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
|
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Early life and education
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
Life and career
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Wartime work
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.
The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.
Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.
Later career
Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.
Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.
In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.
Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.
In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.
Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House. ... His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect. ... The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households. For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents. ... The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists." 'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.
Personal life
Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.
He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".
Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.
In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.
University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.
Works
Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
The Price of Peace, 1945.
Power and Influence, 1953.
"India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.
See also
Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Resources
Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
References
Further reading
Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp 211–28.
Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online
Primary sources
Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).
External links
Sir William Beveridge Foundation
Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
Full text of the report
BBC information
BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives
1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
| true |
[
"Walter Birmingham (January 4, 1913 - August 16, 2004) was an educationist and economist who served as the warden of Toynbee Hall. He also worked on economic planning for West Africa in the post-colonial era.\n\nEarly life \nBirmingham was born in Firozpur, India, in 1913.\n\nHe took night classes at the London School of Economics, obtaining a degree in economics.\n\nCareer \nBirmingham taught at several British, African, and American universities and was involved in economic development planning for West Africa.\n\nHe was professor of economics at the University of Lesotho.\n\nToynbee Hall \nIn 1964, Birmingham was appointed warden of the Victorian charity Toynbee Hall, which had fallen on hard times.\n\nSoon after taking post, he took on the disgraced former government minister John Profumo as a volunteer. Profumo would continue to support Toynbee Hall for decades, eventually becoming chairman of the charity.\n\nPersonal life \nHe married twice with a son and a daughter from his first marriage and two sons and one daughter from the second.\n\nA sculpture of Birmingham by Betty Jukes is housed at Toynbee Hall.\n\nReferences\n\n1913 births\n2004 deaths",
"Toynbee Hall is a charitable institution that works to address the causes and impacts of poverty in the East End of London and elsewhere. Established in 1884, it is based in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and was the first university-affiliated institution of the worldwide settlement movement—a reformist social agenda that strove to get the rich and poor to live more closely together in an interdependent community. It was founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in the economically depressed East End, and was named in memory of their friend and fellow reformer, Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee, who had died the previous year.\n\nToynbee Hall continues to strive to bridge the gap between people of all social and financial backgrounds, with a focus on working towards a future without poverty.\n\nHistory\nShortly after their marriage in 1873, Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, moved to the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. Barnett worked as a vicar at St Jude's church, where he saw poverty at first hand. Late-Victorian Whitechapel was known for its overcrowded living spaces and high criminal activity. In the area of Whitechapel alone, the mortality rate for children under the age of five was around 60% mostly due to the tight living conditions. Charles Booth, another social reformer, mapped London according to eight different social classes, finding that around 70% of people living in the East End were in the lowest three classes.\n\nWhitechapel was also a place where many different immigrants settled. The Great Famine of Ireland in the 19th century led to many Irish settling in Whitechapel. Also, many Jewish immigrants settled in Whitechapel after fleeing from persecution in Western Europe at the time.\n\nThe Barnetts used their roles in the parish to improve the Whitechapel area. They built a church library, introduced art exhibits, brought university lecturers in, and took their parishioners on excursions to the homes of the wealthy and to universities. The Barnetts also tried to encourage officials to improve sanitation and housing and to build more playgrounds and washhouses. However, the attempts the Barnetts made with the parish had little effect on the East End community as a whole. The parish did not reach everyone that lived in the East End. Many of the people did not involve themselves with the established church. In an effort to improve the wellbeing of the community, Barnett had the idea of sharing knowledge and culture. His proposal was to have university students come as volunteers to share their knowledge: the students would be able to help the poor, and at the same time witness poverty at first hand, and potentially develop solutions for it.\n\nIn 1883, Barnett gave a lecture at St John's College, Oxford to gain support for his idea. Barnett was able to gather enough support and a committee called the \"University Settlement of East London\" was set up by Oxford. With these ideas and the support of universities, Barnett founded Toynbee Hall, the first settlement house in the world. Named after another social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, Toynbee Hall first opened its doors on Christmas Eve in 1884. Samuel Barnett was named as the first warden of the hall and Oxford and Cambridge university students came to work at the hall.\n\nBy 1910 more settlement houses were founded in England in the areas of Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Birmingham, Liverpool, and elsewhere in London; as well as in Holland, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, and the United States. In 1911 the leaders of the social settlement movement founded the National Federation of Settlements. One of the best known settlement houses that was inspired after a visit to Toynbee Hall is Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889.\n\nOver time Toynbee Hall implemented many different educational community programmes. At its opening, Toynbee Hall introduced University Extension Society lectures. These lectures were taught by university professors. At the programme's peak, in the 1890s, classes were taught in over 134 topics including; literature, zoology, ethics, philosophy, etc. In order to further promote education, 36 societies or clubs were created in different areas, such as, music, art, history, and science. One of these societies was founded in 1889 and was called the \"Toynbee Travellers\". This group was created after a group of Toynbee Hall residents travelled to Belgium in 1887. Toynbee Hall also began hosting Smoking Room Debates in which community members and invited speakers would come to debate issues of the day. This tradition continued for over twenty years. In 1899, the Poor Man's Lawyer service was introduced. This programme gives free legal services to those who can not afford it, and continues to the present day.\n\nThe settlement movement\n\nThe international settlement movement began at Toynbee Hall, where a community centre was formed that attracted university students who wished to live or \"settle\" among the underprivileged in London's economically depressed East End. They came, according to Samuel Barnett, \"to learn, as much as to teach, to receive as much as to give\". As at most settlement houses, its social workers—students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, among others—resided at Toynbee Hall and sought thereby to get to know their neighbors and their needs on a more intimate, personal level.\n\nToynbee Hall rejected the concept of a community centre as a location for Christian proselytisingas seen in the efforts of the Salvation Army. This principle is reflected in the decision to name it after the social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, who had died in 1883, aged 30. As Henrietta Barnett explained, the name would be \"free from every possible savor of a mission.\"\n\nFrom the beginning, it was non-sectarian and welcomed people of all faiths, despite having been founded by a Church of England cleric. It saw its purpose as more educational than charitable, in a missionary sense. Gertrude Himmelfarb lists some of the activities offered by Toynbee Hall in a typical month: \"evening classes on arithmetic, writing, drawing, citizenship, chemistry, nursing, and music (...); afternoon classes for girls on dressmaking, writing and composition, geography, bookkeeping, needlework, hygiene, reading and recitation, French, singing, cooking, and swimming; and evening sessions devoted to the discussion of legal principles and current social issues\".\n\nBy 1900 there were over 100 settlements in the United States and across the UK, and in 1911 the leaders of the social settlement movement founded the National Federation of Settlements.\n\nCurrent activity\nToday, Toynbee Hall provides a range of programmes and activities, broadly broken down into: youth, the elderly, financial inclusion, debt, advice, free legal advice and community engagement.\n\nEach year over 400 volunteers help to deliver the charity's services.\n\nIn 2006 Toynbee Hall launched Capitalise, a pan-London free debt advice service to support 20,000 people a year with their money worries. In April 2019 this service was rebranded as Debt Free London.\n\nIn 2007 the Toynbee Studios opened in part of the building offering dance and media studios and a theatre.\n\nBuildings\nToynbee Hall, the original building that houses the organisation of the same name, is located in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It was designed by Elijah Hoole in a Tudor-Gothic style, and was formally opened in January 1885. It was built on the site of a disused industrial school, and adjacent to the church of St Jude (built in 1845–46, but demolished in 1927). It was designated a Grade II listed building in 1973. The front of the building bears a Greater London Council blue plaque, erected in 1984, commemorating Jimmy Mallon, warden 1919–54.\n\nSince its foundation, the charity has expanded from the original building into a number of extensions and other neighbouring buildings.\n\nPeople\n\nWardens\n1884–1906 Samuel Barnett\n1906–11 Thomas Edmund Harvey\n1914-17 John St George Currie Heath\n1919–54 James Joseph Mallon\n1954–63 Arthur Eustace Morgan\n1963–64 Jack Catchpool\n1964–72 Walter Birmingham\n1977–87 Donald Piers Chesworth\n1987–92 Alan Lee Williams OBE\n1992–98 Alan Prescott\n1998–2008 Revd Professor Luke Geoghegan\n2008–17 Graham Fisher\n2017– James Minton\n\nChair of trustees\n 1884–96 Philip Lyttelton Gell, first chairman\n Charles Alfred Elliott\n 1911–25 Alfred Milner\n 1933–45 Cosmo Lang\n 1966 Lord Blakenham\n 1982–5 John Profumo\n 1985–90 Sir Harold Atcherley\n 1990–2002 Roger Harrison\n 2002–2009 Christopher Coombe\n 2009–2015 Ben Rowland\n 2015–2022 Julian Corner\n 2022– Steven Burns\n\nNotable associated people\nToynbee residents included R. H. Tawney and Clement Attlee.\nWilliam Beveridge began his career by working as Sub-Warden at Toynbee Hall from 1903 to 1905.\nVisitors to Toynbee Hall included Lenin and Guglielmo Marconi. The latter made the first public presentation of his wireless invention in Toynbee Hall on December 12, 1896.\nLionel Ellis (1885–1970), the military historian, was an Associate Warden of Toynbee Hall after the Second World War. Between the two World Wars, he had been General Secretary of the National Council of Social Service and then Secretary of the National Fitness Council.\nJohn Profumo dedicated much of his time to the Hall from the 1960s onwards after the Profumo affair forced him out of politics.\nSocial reformers from the United States, such as Jane Addams and Gaylord Starin White, visited Toynbee Hall, which inspired their work to establish Hull House in Chicago and Union Settlement in New York City, respectively.\nSir Nicolas Bratza, was a volunteer at Toynbee Hall's Free Legal Advice Centre in the 1970s. He went on to become the President of the European Court of Human Rights from November 2011 to October 2012. In 2014, Sir Nicolas became an Ambassador for Toynbee Hall.\n Marie-Jeanne Bassot visited Hull House, which inspired her establishment of la Résidence sociale in Levallois-Perret (France).\n\nAssociated organisations\nCharles Robert Ashbee created his Guild of Handicraft whilst a resident at Toynbee Hall in the late 1880s.\nThe Whitechapel Art Gallery (founded 1901) grew out of annual free art exhibitions organised by Henrietta Barnett.\nThe Workers Educational Association (WEA) was founded here in 1903.\nChild Poverty Action Group was founded at a meeting held at Toynbee Hall in 1965.\nStepney Children's Fund\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n (on the opening of the new Toynbee Studios)\n\nExternal links\n\n Toynbee Art Club Website for the club that was established in 1886 by C. R. Ashbee during his residence at Toynbee Hall.\n LinkAge Plus Toynbee Hall page on LinkAge Plus site.\n\n1884 establishments in England\nCultural and educational buildings in London\nEducation in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets\nGrade II listed buildings in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets\nHistory of education in the United Kingdom\nHistory of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets\nOrganisations based in London\nSettlement houses\nSpitalfields\nCommercial Street, London"
] |
[
"William Beveridge",
"Life and career",
"What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?",
"After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer.",
"Where did he work as a lawyer?",
"worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London.",
"What year did he work at Toynbee Hall?",
"1903",
"Do we know what he worked on while at Toynbee hall?",
"becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges."
] |
C_237643feedba46959fb07be350fab269_1
|
Where else did Beveridge work?
| 5 |
Other than Toynbee Hall, where else did Beveridge work?
|
William Beveridge
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food. In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
|
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
|
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Early life and education
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
Life and career
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Wartime work
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.
The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.
Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.
Later career
Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.
Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.
In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.
Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.
In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.
Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House. ... His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect. ... The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households. For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents. ... The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists." 'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.
Personal life
Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.
He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".
Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.
In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.
University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.
Works
Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
The Price of Peace, 1945.
Power and Influence, 1953.
"India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.
See also
Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Resources
Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
References
Further reading
Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp 211–28.
Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online
Primary sources
Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).
External links
Sir William Beveridge Foundation
Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
Full text of the report
BBC information
BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives
1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
| true |
[
"James Beveridge (August 12, 1917 – February 16, 1993) was a Canadian filmmaker, author and educator. Beveridge was a pioneering filmmaker at the fledgling National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and rose to become Head of Production and Executive Producer at the NFB in postwar years.\n\nEarly years\nJames A. Beveridge was born in Vancouver and after completing his bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of British Columbia, he received an Imperial Relations Trust Bursary to travel to England where he wanted to write a book on the history of film. In 1939, while seeking out sponsors for his book in London, he met the famous documentary filmmaker, John Grierson who persuaded him to seek out the GPO Film Unit in London to learn about documentary filmmaking.\n\nFilmmaking career\nWhen the Second World War broke out, Grierson sent Beveridge to Ottawa, to help establish the National Film Board of Canada. He was initially hired as a film cutter, then as an editor. During the war, in various duties as editor, director and producer, Beveridge worked on more than 80 documentary films. Films he directed, include The Voice of Action (1942), Banshees Over Canada (1943) and Look to the North (1944).\n\nBeveridge later became a war correspondent in the Royal Canadian Air Force, serving in Europe from 1944–1945. While working on the NFB documentary film, Inside Fighting Canada (1942), he had met fellow NFB colleague Jane Smart, also a director, scriptwriter and editor. Coming back to Canada after the Second World War, Beveridge married Jane Marsh (going by her married name, but divorced at the time), but their marriage was short-lived. According to Beveridge's daughter, he recounted that \"I think Jane couldn't resist a man in an aviator's jacket. They had a brief and disastrous marriage after the war was over. When I once asked him about it, Dad told me that 'they were both too nutty' and so they went their separate ways.\"\n\nFrom 1947 to 1949, Beveridge was Head of Production and Executive Producer at the NFB. From 1951–1954, he was in charge of the European Office of the National Film Board, based in London. After 1954, Beveridge worked occasionally as an independent producer on contract to the NFB, before leaving the Board completely in 1962.\n\nSeeking work internationally, in 1954, Beveridge first began a project in India for the Burmah Shell Oil Company where he produced and directed 40 training films. In the same year, he had married Margaret Coventry, a colleague from his NFB days, and his son Alexander was born; Nicholas and Nina would follow. During his sojourn in India, his film, Himalayan Tapestry; The Craftsmen of Kashmir (1957) won the 1957 President's Gold Medal Award for Best Documentary Film.\n\nAfter a brief role as host and moderator on Lets Face It, the CBC public affairs television series in 1961, Beveridge became the Director, North Carolina Film Board where he produced 15 half-hour documentary and educational films from 1962–1964.\n\nBeveridge returned to Canada to head his own production company in 1965, producing a multi-screen presentation in the \"Man in Control\" theme pavilion at Expo 1967. From 1970, his filmmaking work again took him back to the Far East. While in Japan, Beveridge produced Hands (1975) for Mobil Sekiyu Oil Company, winning the Grand Prize, World Craft Council Film Festival, New York, 1975. Beveridge was also the scriptwriter on Transformations (1977) for Heavy Industries of India (Ministry of Industry, Government of India).\n\nBeveridge continued to be active as a filmmaker for the rest of his life, contributing as a screenwriter, consultant and advisor on a number of international projects. Increasingly, he collaborated with his wife, Margaret, on his many projects.\n\nTeaching\nIn 1970, Beveridge began teaching, as well as acting as a consultant to nascent rural television programs for UNESCO in India. In the same year, he established the Department of Film at York University, Toronto and went on to launch the university's graduate film studies program, the first of its kind in Canada. While maintaining an active international career as a filmmaker, advocate and educator, he also taught at York University intermittently until 1987. During his tenure, Beveridge promoted joint ventures with India and developed a national program for adult literacy, sponsored by UNESCO.\n\nWriting\nIn recounting his work at the NFB and his close association with John Grierson, Beveridge was the author of John Grierson: Film Master (1978). He was also the author of Script Writing for Short Films (1969) and co-author with Wilbur Lang Schramm, of Television and the Social Education of Women: A First Report on the Unesco-Senegal Pilot Project at Dakar, Issues 49-58 (1967). In 2006, Beveridge's life was made the subject of a film written and directed by his daughter, York alumna Nina Beveridge, entitled The Idealist: James Beveridge, Film Guru, which won the Platinum Remi Award for World Peace and Understanding at the 39th WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nCitations\n\nBibliography\n\n Lerner, Loren. Canadian Film and Video: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. .\n McInnes, Graham. One Man's Documentary: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Film Board. Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba, 2004. .\n\nExternal links\n The Idealist: James Beveridge, Film Guru\n \n James Beveridge; Canadian Film Encyclopedia\n James and Margaret Beveridge fonds, York University Libraries\n\n1917 births\n1993 deaths\nCanadian documentary film producers\nCanadian film educators\nCanadian non-fiction writers\nCanadian war correspondents\nNational Film Board of Canada people\nUniversity of British Columbia alumni\nWar correspondents of World War II\nWriters from Vancouver\nYork University faculty\n20th-century non-fiction writers",
"Beveridge is a Scottish surname. Notable people with the surname include:\n\nAda Beveridge (1875–1964), Australian leader of the Country Women's Association\nAlbert Beveridge (1862–1927), American historian and politician\nBill Beveridge (1909–1995), Canadian ice-hockey goaltender\nBob Beveridge (1909–1998), English cricketer\nChristine Beveridge, Australian plant physiologist \nCorie Beveridge, Canadian female curler, 1996 World and Canadian champion\nCrawford Beveridge (born 1947), Scottish businessman, Sun Microsystems\nDaeida Wilcox Beveridge (1861–1914), co-developer of Hollywood, California\nGeorge D. Beveridge (1922–1987), American journalist\nGordon Beveridge (1933–1999), Scottish academic and university administrator\nGraeme Beveridge (born 1976), Scottish rugby union player\nHenry Beveridge (1837–1929), English civil servant and orientalist\nJames Beveridge (1917–1993), Canadian filmmaker, author and educator \nJane Marsh Beveridge (1915–1998), Canadian filmmaker, educator and sculptor\nJohn Beveridge (mayor) (1848–1916), New South Wales businessman and Alderman\nJohn Lourie Beveridge (1824–1910), American politician, Governor of Illinois 1873–1877\nJudith Beveridge (born 1956), Australian poet, editor and academic\nLuke Beveridge (born 1970), Australian rules footballer and coach\nRabbie Beveridge (1877–1901), Scottish footballer\nWilliam Beveridge (bishop) (1637–1708), English Bishop of St Asaph\nWilliam Beveridge (footballer) (1858–1941), Scottish footballer and athlete\nWilliam Beveridge (1879–1963), British economist and social reformer\nWilliam Ian Beardmore Beveridge (1908–2006), Australian animal pathologist\n\nFirst name\n Beveridge C. Dunlop (1879–1961), New York politician\n\nSee also\nBeveridge, Victoria, town in Victoria, Australia\nBeveridge, California, unincorporated community in California, United States\nBeveridge curve\nBeveridge Locks, canal locks connecting the Tay River to the Rideau Canal Waterway in Drummond/North Elmsley, Ontario, Canada\nBeveridge Reef\nBeveridge Report\n\nScottish surnames"
] |
[
"William Beveridge",
"Life and career",
"What is an example of a job that William Beveridge held early in his career?",
"After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer.",
"Where did he work as a lawyer?",
"worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London.",
"What year did he work at Toynbee Hall?",
"1903",
"Do we know what he worked on while at Toynbee hall?",
"becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.",
"Where else did Beveridge work?",
"In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science."
] |
C_237643feedba46959fb07be350fab269_1
|
What did he work on at the London School of Economics and Political Science?
| 6 |
What did Beveridge work on at the London School of Economics and Political Science?
|
William Beveridge
|
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges. In 1908, now considered to be the United Kingdom's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food. In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists - in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909) and a large historical study of prices and wages (1939). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937, Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford. CANNOTANSWER
|
he served on several commissions and committees on social policy.
|
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.
He built his career as an expert on unemployment insurance. He served on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
Beveridge published widely on unemployment and social security, his most notable works being: Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909), Planning Under Socialism (1936), Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), Pillars of Security (1943), Power and Influence (1953) and A Defence of Free Learning (1959). He was elected in a 1944 by-election as a Liberal MP (for Berwick-upon-Tweed); following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he was elevated to the House of Lords where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Early life and education
Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and District Judge, and scholar Annette Ackroyd, was born in Rangpur, British India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879.
Beveridge's mother had, with Elizabeth Malleson, founded the Working Women's College in Queen Square, London in 1864. She met and married Henry Beveridge in Calcutta where she had gone in 1873 to open a school for Indian girls. William Beveridge was educated at Charterhouse, a leading public school near the market town of Godalming in Surrey, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Mathematics and Classics, obtaining a first class degree in both. He later studied law.
While Beveridge's mother had been a member of the Stourbridge Unitarian community, his father was an early humanist and positivist activist and "an ardent disciple" of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and would exert a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a "materialist agnostic", in his words.
Life and career
After leaving university, Beveridge initially became a lawyer. He became interested in the social services and wrote about the subject for the Morning Post newspaper. His interest in the causes of unemployment began in 1903 when he worked at Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London. There he worked closely with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and was influenced by their theories of social reform, becoming active in promoting old age pensions, free school meals, and campaigning for a national system of labour exchanges.
In 1908, now considered to be Britain's leading authority on unemployment insurance, he was introduced by Beatrice Webb to Winston Churchill, who had recently been promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Churchill invited Beveridge to join the Board of Trade, and he organised the implementation of the national system of labour exchanges and National Insurance to combat unemployment and poverty. During the First World War he was involved in mobilising and controlling manpower. After the war, he was knighted and made permanent secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In 1919 he left the civil service to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Over the next few years he served on several commissions and committees on social policy. He was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could be considered one of their number. He published academic economic works including his early work on unemployment (1909). The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Edwin Cannan and Lionel Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots. From 1929 he led the International scientific committee on price history, contributing a large historical study, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939).
In 1933 he helped set up the Academic Assistance Council. This helped prominent academics who had been dismissed from their posts on grounds of race, religion or political position to escape Nazi persecution. In 1937 Beveridge was appointed Master of University College, Oxford.
Wartime work
Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.
His work on manpower culminated in his chairmanship of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services which reported to the War Cabinet in August and October 1941. Two recommendations of the committee were implemented: Army recruits were enlisted for their first six weeks into the General Service Corps, so that their subsequent posting could take account of their skills and the Army's needs; and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers was created.
Report on social insurance and views on full employment
An opportunity for Bevin to ease Beveridge out presented itself in May 1941 when Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced the formation of a committee of officials to survey existing social insurance and allied services, and to make recommendations. Although Brown had made the announcement, the inquiry had largely been urged by Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood, and Bevin suggested to Greenwood making Beveridge chairman of the committee. Beveridge, at first uninterested and seeing the committee as a distraction from his work on manpower, accepted only reluctantly.
The report to Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in November 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the "five giants on the road of reconstruction" of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.
Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He appealed to conservatives and other sceptics by arguing that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Beveridge saw full employment (defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. Full Employment in a Free Society, written in 1944 expressed the view that it was "absurd" to "look to individual employers for maintenance of demand and full employment." These things must be "undertaken by the State under the supervision and pressure of democracy." Measures for achieving full-employment might include Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society.
Later career
Later in 1944, Beveridge, who had recently joined the Liberal Party, was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election to succeed George Charles Grey, who had died on the battlefield in Normandy, France, on the first day of Operation Bluecoat on 30 July 1944. Beveridge briefly served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, during which time he was prominent in the Radical Action group, which called for the party to withdraw from the war-time electoral pact and adopt more radical policies. However, he lost his seat at the 1945 general election, when he was defeated by the Conservative candidate, Robert Thorp, by a majority of 1,962 votes.
Clement Attlee and the Labour Party defeated Winston Churchill's Conservative Party in that election and the new Labour Government began the process of implementing Beveridge's proposals that provided the basis of the modern Welfare State. Attlee announced he would introduce the Welfare State outlined in the 1942 Beveridge Report. This included the establishment of a National Health Service in 1948 with taxpayer funded medical treatment for all. A national system of benefits was also introduced to provide "social security" so that the population would be protected from the "cradle to the grave". The new system was partly built upon the National Insurance scheme set up by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1911.
In 1946, Beveridge was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Beveridge, of Tuggal in the County of Northumberland, and eventually became leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. He was the author of Power and Influence (1953). He was the President of the charity Attend (then the National Association of Leagues of Hospital Friends) from 1952 to 1962.
Eugenics
Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." Whilst director of the London School of Economics, Beveridge attempted to create a Department of Social Biology. Though never fully established, Lancelot Hogben, a fierce anti-eugenicist, was named its chair. Former LSE director John Ashworth speculated that discord between those in favour and those against the serious study of eugenics led to Beveridge's departure from the school in 1937.
In the 1940s, Beveridge credited the Eugenics Society with promoting the children's allowance, which was incorporated into his 1942 report. However, whilst he held views in support of eugenics, he did not believe the report had any overall "eugenic value". Professor Danny Dorling said that "there is not even the faintest hint" of eugenic thought in the report.
Dennis Sewell states that "On the day the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report in 1943, its author slipped out of the gallery early in the evening to address a meeting of the Eugenics Society at the Mansion House. ... His report he was keen to reassure them, was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect. ... The idea of child allowances had been developed within the society with the twin aims of encouraging the educated professional classes to have more children than they currently did and, at the same time, to limit the number of children born to poor households. For both effects to be properly stimulated, the allowance needed to be graded: middle-class parents receiving more generous payments than working-class parents. ... The Home Secretary had that very day signalled that the government planned a flat rate of child allowance. But Beveridge, alluding to the problem of an overall declining birth rate, argued that even the flat rate would be eugenic. Nevertheless, he held out hope for the purists." 'Sir William made it clear that it was in his view not only possible but desirable that graded family allowance schemes, applicable to families in the higher income brackets, be administered concurrently with his flat rate scheme,' reported the Eugenics Review.
Personal life
Beveridge married the mathematician Janet Philip, daughter of William Philip and widow of David Mair, in 1942. They had worked together in the civil service and at LSE, and she was instrumental in the drafting and publicising of the Beveridge Report.
He died at his home on 16 March 1963, aged 84, and was buried in Thockrington churchyard, on the Northumbrian moors. His barony became extinct upon his death. His last words were "I have a thousand things to do".
Commemoration
Beveridge Street in the Christchurch Central City was named for William Beveridge. It was one of 120 streets that were renamed in 1948 by Peter Fraser's Labour Government of New Zealand.
In November 2018, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Beveridge at 27 Bedford Gardens in Campden Hill, London W8 7EF where he lived from 1914 until 1921.
University College, Oxford's society for students studying and tutors involved in the study of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was recently renamed the Beveridge Society in his honour.
Works
Unemployment: A problem of industry, 1909. online (Archive.org)
'Wages in the Winchester Manors', Economic History Review, Vol. VII, 1936–37.
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 1939.
Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942. (The Beveridge Report)
The Pillars of Security and Other War-Time Essays and Addresses, 1943, republished 2014.
Full Employment in a Free Society, 1944.
The Economics of Full Employment, 1944.
Why I am a Liberal, 1945.
The Price of Peace, 1945.
Power and Influence, 1953.
"India Called Them," George Allen & Unwin, 1947
Plan for Britain: A Collection of Essays prepared for the Fabian Society by G. D. H. Cole, Aneurin Bevan, Jim Griffiths, L. F. Easterbrook, Sir William Beveridge, and Harold J. Laski (Not illustrated with 127 text pages).
'Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era', Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII, 1955.
See also
Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee's Health Minister
Beveridge curve – the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate
List of liberal theorists
List of British university chancellors and vice-chancellors
List of United Kingdom MPs with the shortest service
List of Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Resources
Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1997. .
Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. .
William Beveridge's archives are held at the London School of Economics.
Photographs of William Beveridge held by LSE Archives
Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
References
Further reading
Addison, Paul. The Road To 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1977) pp 211–28.
Harris, Jose. William Beveridge: a biography (1997) online.
Hills, John et al. eds. Beveridge and Social Security: an International Retrospective (1994)
Robertson, David Brian. "Policy entrepreneurs and policy divergence: John R. Commons and William Beveridge." Social Service Review 62.3 (1988): 504–531.
Sugita, Yoneyuki. "The Beveridge Report and Japan." Social work in public health 29.2 (2014): 148–161.
Whiteside, Noel. "The Beveridge Report and its implementation: A revolutionary project?." Histoire@ Politique 3 (2014): 24–37. online
Primary sources
Williams, Ioan, and Karel Williams, eds. A Beveridge Reader (2014); (Works of William H. Beveridge).
External links
Sir William Beveridge Foundation
Spartacus Educational on William Beveridge and The Beveridge Report
Full text of the report
BBC information
BBC Radio 4, Great Lives – Downloadable 30 minute discussion of William Beveridge
Catalogue of William Beveridge's papers at the London School of Economics (LSE Archives)
Cataloguing the Beveridge papers at LSE Archives
1879 births
1963 deaths
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom
British agnostics
British humanists
British economists
British reformers
British social liberals
Civil servants in the Board of Trade
English people of Scottish descent
Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath
Liberal Party (UK) hereditary peers
Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Masters of University College, Oxford
People educated at Charterhouse School
People associated with the London School of Economics
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Food
Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society
British social reformers
UK MPs 1935–1945
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Vice-Chancellors of the University of London
Peers created by George VI
| true |
[
"Richard Bradley (born 13 December 1964) is a South African philosopher. He is a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a project leader at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, and the former editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy.\n\nBradley is best known for work on decision theory, formal epistemology, semantics, and climate change policy. His PhD thesis began his work on decisions involving conditional attitudes, which culminates in his 2017 book Decision Theory with a Human Face.\n\nBiography\nBradley attended the University of Witwatersrand studying economics, politics and sociology. He holds an MSc in Social Philosophy from the LSE and completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Richard Jeffrey and David Malament.\n\nSelected publications\n\nReferences \n\nAcademics of the London School of Economics\nSouth African philosophers\n1964 births\nLiving people",
"Simon Hix is a British political scientist, holder of the Stein Rokkan chair in comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence. He was also Harold Laski Professor of Political Science and pro-director for research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Hix is an expert in European Union politics, and the author of several books, including What's Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament with Abdul Noury and Gérard Roland, and The Political System of the European Union. He is also associate editor of the international peer-reviewed European Union Politics, and founder and chairman of VoteWatch Europe, an influential online EU affairs think-tank founded in London in 2009 that combines big data with political insight. After a first degree and a master's from the London School of Economics and Political Science, Simon Hix obtained a PhD in Political and Social Science at the European University Institute in Florence in 1995, and lectured in European Politics at Brunel University 1996–97, before joining the LSE in 1997. In this university he was promoted to professor in 2004, and served also as head of its department of government (2012-2015), academic director of its school of public policy (2017-2019), and pro-director for research from 2019. He finally was appointed Stein Rokkan chair of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence in 2021. His main areas of research are voting in parliaments, democratic institutions, and EU politics.\n\nDistinctions\nSimon Hix was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011. In 2015 he was named the inaugural Harold Laski Chair at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Later that year he was awarded a degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest. In 2021 he was appointed Stein Rokkan Chair in comparative politics at the European University Institute.\n\nPublications\nPolitical Parties in the European Union (1997), with Christopher Lord, London: Macmillan.\nThe Political System of the European Union (1999), London: Palgrave.\nGötz, Klaus H.; Hix, Simon, eds. (2001). Europeanised Politics? : European Integration and National Political Systems. Frank Cass. . .\nHix, Simon; Raunio, Tapio; Scully, Roger (2003). \"Fifty Years on: Research on the European Parliament\". JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. Blackwell Science Ltd. 41 (2): 191–202. . ISSN 0021-9886 – via John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.\nHix, Simon; Høyland, Bjørn (2005). The Political System of the European Union. The European Union Series (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. . .\nHix, Simon; Noury, Abdul G.; Gérard, Roland (2007). Democratic Politics in the European Parliament. Cambridge University Press. . .\nHix, Simon (2013) [First published in 2008]. What's Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It. John Wiley & Sons. . .\nHix, Simon; Høyland, Bjørn (2011). The Political System of the European Union. The European Union Series (3rd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. . .\n\nReferences\n\nAcademics of the London School of Economics\nFellows of the British Academy\nLiving people\nBritish political scientists\nPlace of birth missing (living people)\nEuropean Union and European integration scholars\nEuropean University Institute alumni\nEuropean University Institute faculty\nAlumni of the London School of Economics\n1968 births"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)"
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
What is the independent circuit?
| 1 |
What is the independent circuit?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"The superposition theorem is a derived result of the superposition principle suited to the network analysis of electrical circuits. The superposition theorem states that for a linear system (notably including the subcategory of time-invariant linear systems) the response (voltage or current) in any branch of a bilateral linear circuit having more than one independent source equals the algebraic sum of the responses caused by each independent source acting alone, where all the other independent sources are replaced by their internal impedances.\n\nTo ascertain the contribution of each individual source, all of the other sources first must be \"turned off\" (set to zero) by:\n Replacing all other independent voltage sources with a short circuit (thereby eliminating difference of potential i.e. V=0; internal impedance of ideal voltage source is zero (short circuit)).\n Replacing all other independent current sources with an open circuit (thereby eliminating current i.e. I=0; internal impedance of ideal current source is infinite (open circuit)).\nThis procedure is followed for each source in turn, then the resultant responses are added to determine the true operation of the circuit. The resultant circuit operation is the superposition of the various voltage and current sources.\n\nThe superposition theorem is very important in circuit analysis. It is used in converting any circuit into its Norton equivalent or Thevenin equivalent.\n\nThe theorem is applicable to linear networks (time varying or time invariant) consisting of independent sources, linear dependent sources, linear passive elements (resistors, inductors, capacitors) and linear transformers.\n\nSuperposition works for voltage and current but not power. In other words, the sum of the powers of each source with the other sources turned off is not the real consumed power. To calculate power we first use superposition to find both current and voltage of each linear element and then calculate the sum of the multiplied voltages and currents.\n\nHowever, if the linear network is operating in steady-state and each external independent source has a different frequency, then superposition can be applied to compute the average power or active power. If at least two independent sources have the same frequency (for example in power systems, where many generators operate at 50 Hz or 60 Hz), then superposition can't be used to determine average power.\n\nGas pressure analogy\nThe electric circuit superposition theorem is analogous to Dalton's law of partial pressure which can be stated as the total pressure exerted by an ideal gas mixture in a given volume is the algebraic sum of all the pressures exerted by each gas if it were alone in that volume.\n\nReferences\n\n Electronic Devices and Circuit Theory (9th ed.) by Boylestad and Nashelsky\n Basic Circuit Theory by C. A. Desoer and E. H. Kuh\n ''Edward Hughes revised by John.K, Keith.B etal (2008) Electrical and Electronic Technology (10th ed.) Pearson page 75-77\n\nExternal links\nOn the Application of Superposition to Dependent Sources in Circuit Analysis – proves superposition of dependent sources is valid.\nCircuit theorems\n\nde:Superposition (Physik)#Elektrotechnik",
"In mathematics, a basis of a matroid is a maximal independent set of the matroid—that is, an independent set that is not contained in any other independent set.\n\nExamples \nAs an example, consider the matroid over the ground-set R2 (the vectors in the two-dimensional Euclidean plane), with the following independent sets: It has two bases, which are the sets {(0,1),(2,0)} , {(0,3),(2,0)}. These are the only independent sets that are maximal under inclusion.\n\nThe basis has a specialized name in several specialized kinds of matroids:\n\n In a graphic matroid, where the independent sets are the forests, the bases are called the spanning forests of the graph. \n In a transversal matroid, where the independent sets are endpoints of matchings in a given bipartite graph, the bases are called transversals. \n In a linear matroid, where the independent sets are the linearly-independent sets of vectors in a given vector-space, the bases are just called bases of the vector space. Hence, the concept of basis of a matroid generalizes the concept of basis from linear algebra. \nIn a uniform matroid, where the independent sets are all sets with cardinality at most k (for some integer k), the bases are all sets with cardinality exactly k. \nIn a partition matroid, where elements are partitioned into categories and the independent sets are all sets containing at most kc elements from each category c, the bases are all sets which contain exactly kc elements from category c. \nIn a free matroid, where all subsets of the ground-set E are independent, the unique basis is E.\n\nProperties\n\nExchange \nAll matroids satisfy the following properties, for any two distinct bases and :\n\n Basis-exchange property: if , then there exists an element such that is a basis. \n Symmetric basis-exchange property: if , then there exists an element such that both and are bases. Brualdi showed that it is in fact equivalent to the basis-exchange property. \n Multiple symmetric basis-exchange property: if , then there exists a subset such that both and are bases. Brylawski, Greene, and Woodall, showed (independently) that it is in fact equivalent to the basis-exchange property. \n Bijective basis-exchange property: There is a bijection from to , such that for every , is a basis. Brualdi showed that it is equivalent to the basis-exchange property. \nPartition basis-exchange property: For each partition of into m parts, there exists a partition of into m parts, such that for every , is a basis.\n\nHowever, a basis-exchange property that is both symmetric and bijective is not satisfied by all matroids: it is satisfied only by base-orderable matroids.\n\nIn general, in the symmetric basis-exchange property, the element need not be unique. Regular matroids have the unique exchange property, meaning that for some , the corresponding b is unique.\n\nCardinality \nIt follows from the basis exchange property that no member of can be a proper subset of another.\n\nMoreover, all bases of a given matroid have the same cardinality. In a linear matroid, the cardinality of all bases is called the dimension of the vector space.\n\nNeil White's conjecture \nIt is conjectured that all matroids satisfy the following property: For every integer t ≥ 1, If B and B' are two t-tuples of bases with the same multi-set union, then there is a sequence of symmetric exchanges that transforms B to B'.\n\nCharacterization \nThe bases of a matroid characterize the matroid completely: a set is independent if and only if it is a subset of a basis. Moreover, one may define a matroid to be a pair , where is the ground-set and is a collection of subsets of , called \"bases\", with the following properties:\n\n(B1) There is at least one base -- is nonempty;\n\n(B2) If and are distinct bases, and , then there exists an element such that is a basis (this is the basis-exchange property).\n(B2) implies that, given any two bases A and B, we can transform A into B by a sequence of exchanges of a single element. In particular, this implies that all bases must have the same cardinality.\n\nDuality \nIf is a finite matroid, we can define the orthogonal or dual matroid by calling a set a basis in if and only if its complement is in . It can be verified that is indeed a matroid. The definition immediately implies that the dual of is .\n\nUsing duality, one can prove that the property (B2) can be replaced by the following:(B2*) If and are distinct bases, and , then there exists an element such that is a basis.\n\nCircuits \nA dual notion to a basis is a circuit. A circuit in a matroid is a minimal dependent set—that is, a dependent set whose proper subsets are all independent. The terminology arises because the circuits of graphic matroids are cycles in the corresponding graphs.\n\none may define a matroid to be a pair , where is the ground-set and is a collection of subsets of , called \"circuits\", with the following properties:\n(C1) The empty set is not a circuit;\n(C2) A subset of a circuit is not a circuit;\n(C3) If C1 and C2 are circuits, and x is an element in their intersection, then contains a circuit.\n\nAnother property of circuits is that, if a set is independent, and the set is dependent (i.e., adding the element makes it dependent), then contains a unique circuit , and it contains . This circuit is called the fundamental circuit of w.r.t. . It is analogous to the linear algebra fact, that if adding a vector to an independent vector set makes it dependent, then there is a unique linear combination of elements of that equals .\n\nSee also \n\n Matroid polytope - a polytope in Rn (where n is the number of elements in the matroid), whose vertices are indicator vectors of the bases of the matroid.\n\nReferences \n\nMatroid theory"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
What happened significanti n 1990?
| 2 |
What was something significant that happened 1990?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy",
"What Happened may refer to:\n\n What Happened (Clinton book), 2017 book by Hillary Clinton\n What Happened (McClellan book), 2008 autobiography by Scott McClellan\n \"What Happened\", a song by Sublime from the album 40oz. to Freedom\n \"What Happened\", an episode of One Day at a Time (2017 TV series)\n\nSee also\nWhat's Happening (disambiguation)"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
Why did he go to jail?
| 3 |
Why did Bruce go to jail?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
gang life
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"Pay Jail is a jail cell upgrade for non-violent offenders in jail costing from $75 to $171 a night.\n\nAmenities \nInmates are allowed to bring an iPod, cellphone, or laptop in their cell or watch TV in the common room. Some may even get to leave during the day to go to work. Inmates are allowed to roam the prison campus (which are not necessarily fenced). Prisoners are safe from prison gangs and other dangerous prisoners. They may have their food delivered to their cell rather than going the jail's cafeteria or they may choose to enjoy meals brought by their families during visiting hours.\n\nParis Hilton reputedly said that she chose not to go to a \"pay jail.\"\n\nReferences\n\nFootnotes\n\nNotations\n Clarence Page op ed regarding \"pay jail\"\n Video about Pay Jails in CA\nSanta Anna California\nTorrance California\n\nPenal system in California",
"Kaise Kahoon Ke... Pyaar Hai is a 2003 Bollywood film. It stars Amit Hingorani, Sharbani Mukherjee, Dharmendra, and Farida Jalal. It also stars Sunny Deol in a very special role in an extended cameo appearance. The movie was directed by Anil Kumaar Sharma and produced by Arjun Hingorani. The film failed at the box office however the soundtrack was very popular.\n\nPlot \n\nKaran (Amit Hongorani) is the son of Lakshmi (Farida Jalal) and Dharam (Dharmendra). His father is a professional robber, so his mother leaves him to raise Karan and his sister Kiran in dignity. However, when Karan comes of age, he supports his fathers nocturnal adventures and becomes a successful burglar.\n\nIn college, he falls in love with Priya (Sharbani Mukherjee), the daughter of the wealthy Somnath Arya (Alok Nath). Since he is a burglar, he does not dare to tell Priya about his love—however, he tells Sandwich (Johnny Lever), his loyal friend. Priya is also in love with Karan, but doesn't tell him because she is shy, despite her best friend Nikki's (Rushali) attempts to matchmake the two of them - and things get difficult for her when Sonia (Nilofer) joins the college, who is extremely good-looking and tries to woo Karan. However, at a party, Karan finally admits his feelings for Priya and she is beyond happy. He tells his father that the robbery at a diamond exhibition will be his last deed, since they want to donate the money out of it to a cancer hospital.\n\nThings get difficult when CBI officer Arjun Singh (Sunny Deol) announced that he will catch Karan in just ten days. During the robbery, Arjun Singh shows up and Dharam gets shot and Karan caught - he is sent to jail for one year.\n\nLakshmi and Kiran are devastated; his mother disowns him. Priya, while Karan is gone, cannot forget him. After a year, Karan apologized to his mother, telling her he'll never steal again, but doesn't gather the courage to call Priya and decides to leave it that way. However, he takes up a job with Somnath Arya, Priyas father and meets her again. They confess their love for each other and Somnath wants them to get married. However, Karan finds out that he has blood cancer. He stages some kind of fake drama on the engagement day to convince Priya he is actually in love with Sonia - so she will forget him and fall out of love to be saved from the consequences when his disease will finally kill him.\n\nKaran tells Somnath the truth and asks him for help to get his sister Kiran married so she will be provided for when he will finally die. Somnath reveals that his entire company his held ransom by Deoraj (Shakti Kapoor), who himself was under threat from Thakur, a powerful underworld lord. Somnath asks Karan to help him get an important document out of Deoraj's safe - in exchange he will make sure Kiran is married off. Karan agrees and steals the document only to be arrested the next day for Deoraj's murder. Lakshmi again is a broken woman, but Sandwich who knows that Karan did what he did to save the family, explains everything to her. Sonia also explains to Priya why Karan left her. Priya rushes to jail to talk to Karan and after and some emotional exclamations, things get out of control and she falls down the stars, badly wounded. Karan happens to have the same blood group and is asked for a donation, where it is revealed that he does not suffer from blood cancer.\n\nIn jail, he realizes that the real culprit is still out there, but why did he kill Deoraj and why did the doctors lie to him? With the help of Arjun Singh, Karan breaks out of jail to find the answers ...\n\nCast\n\nSoundtrack\nThe music was directed by Viju Shah\n\nExternal links \n\n Official Site\n\n2003 films\n2000s Hindi-language films\nIndian films\nFilms scored by Viju Shah"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life"
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
What did he do after jail?
| 4 |
What did Bruce do after jail?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"\"Talk to Me\" is a song by American rapper Drakeo the Ruler featuring Canadian rapper Drake. It was released on February 23, 2021, as the lead single from the former's ninth mixtape The Truth Hurts (2021). The song was produced by EY.\n\nBackground\nDrakeo the Ruler teased the song in December 2020, shortly after his release from jail. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Drakeo the Ruler stated that during his wrongful incarceration, Drake had already finished his part of the song:\n\nWhen I was in jail, I was supposed to do something already. Everybody was telling me, but I had got my privileges taken. They was telling me he had something for me, but I'm like, \"Whatever, bro.\" I got out of jail and my engineer was like, \"Why you don't follow Drake?\" I'm like, \"He don't follow me, bro.\" Then I looked, and I'm like, \"Oh yeah.\" So I hit him up, I'm like, \"Let's do something.\" And then he's like, \"What's your number? I got this song I did for you.\" And then it kind of clicked in my head what they was talking about before. I'm like, \"Dang.\" At first, I was like, \"That's kind of different, but I'm like, nah. This Drake. I'm finna do whatever.\" But at first, I'm like I don't usually really do something like that. But then when I got on it, I'm like, \"Oh yeah, this hard.\" I'm just like \"Drake bro!\" Like all right.\n\nComposition and lyrics\n\"Talk to Me\" is a hip hop song with an R&B-style chorus and \"smoothed-out\" production. Chris DeVille of Stereogum wrote about the song, \"Drake is in swaggering pop mode, while Drakeo stays in the cut muttering hard street talk as usual.\" The song opens with Drake singing about his infatuation in the chorus, \"I don't know if what we have is love, but it's on my mind / We might slide on a nigga inside this club, girl, close your eyes / Fifteen brothers, no friends when I pull up, for peace of mind / Lights come on, I'ma need you to come find me, don't be so shy\". Drakeo the Ruler raps two verses using a \"West Coast gangster appeal\" (\"Don't be shy, I got killers with me, stupid / I march with sticks, I ain't worried bout no groupies\"), with \"lovesick bars\". He raps about his time in jail as well.\n\nCritical reception\n\"Fnr Tigg\" of Complex wrote that for the track, \"Drakeo the Ruler decided to highlight his versatility by venturing into Drizzy's world to make a street ballad.\" Jeff Ihaza of Rolling Stone described Drake as \"slotting seamlessly onto the track's moody interpretation of West Coast rap's springy production.\"\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2021 singles\n2021 songs\nDrakeo the Ruler songs\nDrake (musician) songs\nSongs written by Drake (musician)",
"Jo Reed was an African American man who was lynched in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 30, 1875, where he was taken by a white mob from the county jail after being arrested for killing a police officer in a confrontation. He was hanged from a suspension bridge but, after the rope broke, Reed survived the attempted lynching, escaped via the river, and left Nashville to go West.\n\nIn contrast to similar later incidents, both the governor of Tennessee and mayor of Nashville intervened after Reed was arrested, seeking extra police protection at the jail. (The sheriff did not supply it.) Rumors were rampant about a lynching, and the mayor tried to hold off the mob from the jail. The Nashville City Council condemned the lynching. Two white men were arrested for breaking into the jail, but no other prosecution took place.\n\nLynching\nJo Reed, an African-American man, was apprehended in Clarksville, Tennessee, by Robert Frazier, a police officer, on suspicion of domestic violence. Frazier tried to arrest Reed and take him to the \"work-house\", but Reed shot Frazier in the chest. Frazier died and Reed ran away, but he was arrested shortly after in Davidson County. \n\nReed was taken to the Davidson County Jail. Unidentified individuals in town began calling for his lynching. At 4PM on April 30, 1875, Tennessee Governor James D. Porter and Nashville Mayor Morton Boyte Howell met at the Maxwell House Hotel, where they asked Sheriff E. D. Whitworth and Deputy-Sheriff Wilkinson to add a guard in front of Reed's cell. The officers were unable or unwilling to find a guard to do it.\n\nAt dusk on April 30, a white mob rallied outside the jail, and police officers stood in front of the crowd. The mayor asked the mob to leave, but 25 unmasked men entered the jail and dragged Reed out of his cell. They put a noose around his neck, took him to a suspension bridge, and hanged him there. The rope broke and mob members shot at Reed, but he jumped into the river and escaped. Reed survived, returning to his house, where he saw a physician. He quickly left Nashville, and was believed to be going west, possibly to Kansas. \n\nThe Nashville City Council condemned the lynching, as did reporting by the Memphis Daily Appeal. On July 13, 1875, John W. Luster and Dan Gilmore were arrested for breaking into the jail. Luster admitted he was outside the jail, but he denied going in.\n\nLegacy\nIn June 2019 Jo Reed is to be acknowledged by his name on a memorial in downtown Nashville as a victim of attempted lynching in 1875. A metropolitan coalition known as \"We Remember Nashville,\" together with the Equal Justice Initiative, plans events and education related to the four cases of lynching in the city in the late 19th century.\n\nReferences\n\n1875 crimes in the United States\n1875 in Tennessee\nApril 1875 events\nLynching survivors in the United States\nAfrican-American history in Nashville, Tennessee"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life",
"What did he do after jail?",
"Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
What happened between 1990 and 1994?
| 5 |
What happened between 1990 and 1994 to Bruce?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books",
"\"What Happened to Us\" is a song by Australian recording artist Jessica Mauboy, featuring English recording artist Jay Sean. It was written by Sean, Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim and Israel Cruz. \"What Happened to Us\" was leaked online in October 2010, and was released on 10 March 2011, as the third single from Mauboy's second studio album, Get 'Em Girls (2010). The song received positive reviews from critics.\n\nA remix of \"What Happened to Us\" made by production team OFM, was released on 11 April 2011. A different version of the song which features Stan Walker, was released on 29 May 2011. \"What Happened to Us\" charted on the ARIA Singles Chart at number 14 and was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA). An accompanying music video was directed by Mark Alston, and reminisces on a former relationship between Mauboy and Sean.\n\nProduction and release\n\n\"What Happened to Us\" was written by Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim, Israel Cruz and Jay Sean. It was produced by Skaller, Cruz, Rohaim and Bobby Bass. The song uses C, D, and B minor chords in the chorus. \"What Happened to Us\" was sent to contemporary hit radio in Australia on 14 February 2011. The cover art for the song was revealed on 22 February on Mauboy's official Facebook page. A CD release was available for purchase via her official website on 10 March, for one week only. It was released digitally the following day.\n\nReception\nMajhid Heath from ABC Online Indigenous called the song a \"Jordin Sparks-esque duet\", and wrote that it \"has a nice innocence to it that rings true to the experience of losing a first love.\" Chris Urankar from Nine to Five wrote that it as a \"mid-tempo duet ballad\" which signifies Mauboy's strength as a global player. On 21 March 2011, \"What Happened to Us\" debuted at number 30 on the ARIA Singles Chart, and peaked at number 14 the following week. The song was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), for selling 70,000 copies. \"What Happened to Us\" spent a total of ten weeks in the ARIA top fifty.\n\nMusic video\n\nBackground\nThe music video for the song was shot in the Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney on 26 November 2010. The video was shot during Sean's visit to Australia for the Summerbeatz tour. During an interview with The Daily Telegraph while on the set of the video, Sean said \"the song is sick! ... Jessica's voice is amazing and we're shooting [the video] in this ridiculously beautiful mansion overlooking the harbour.\" The video was directed by Mark Alston, who had previously directed the video for Mauboy's single \"Let Me Be Me\" (2009). It premiered on YouTube on 10 February 2011.\n\nSynopsis and reception\nThe video begins showing Mauboy who appears to be sitting on a yellow antique couch in a mansion, wearing a purple dress. As the video progresses, scenes of memories are displayed of Mauboy and her love interest, played by Sean, spending time there previously. It then cuts to the scenes where Sean appears in the main entrance room of the mansion. The final scene shows Mauboy outdoors in a gold dress, surrounded by green grass and trees. She is later joined by Sean who appears in a black suit and a white shirt, and together they sing the chorus of the song to each other. David Lim of Feed Limmy wrote that the video is \"easily the best thing our R&B princess has committed to film – ever\" and praised the \"mansion and wondrous interior décor\". He also commended Mauboy for choosing Australian talent to direct the video instead of American directors, which she had used for her previous two music videos. Since its release, the video has received over two million views on Vevo.\n\nLive performances\nMauboy performed \"What Happened to Us\" live for the first time during her YouTube Live Sessions program on 4 December 2010. She also appeared on Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight on 23 February 2011 for an interview and later performed the song. On 15 March 2011, Mauboy performed \"What Happened to Us\" on Sunrise. She also performed the song with Stan Walker during the Australian leg of Chris Brown's F.A.M.E. Tour in April 2011. Mauboy and Walker later performed \"What Happened to Us\" on Dancing with the Stars Australia on 29 May 2011. From November 2013 to February 2014, \"What Happened to Us\" was part of the set list of the To the End of the Earth Tour, Mauboy's second headlining tour of Australia, with Nathaniel Willemse singing Sean's part.\n\nTrack listing\n\nDigital download\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean – 3:19\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Sgt Slick Remix) – 6:33\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Just Witness Remix) – 3:45\n\nCD single\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Album Version) – 3:19\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Sgt Slick Remix) – 6:33\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (OFM Remix) – 3:39\n\nDigital download – Remix\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (OFM Remix) – 3:38\n\nDigital download\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Stan Walker – 3:20\n\nPersonnel\nSongwriting – Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim, Israel Cruz, Jay Sean\nProduction – Jeremy Skaller, Bobby Bass\nAdditional production – Israel Cruz, Khaled Rohaim\nLead vocals – Jessica Mauboy, Jay Sean\nMixing – Phil Tan\nAdditional mixing – Damien Lewis\nMastering – Tom Coyne \nSource:\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly chart\n\nYear-end chart\n\nCertification\n\nRadio dates and release history\n\nReferences\n\n2010 songs\n2011 singles\nJessica Mauboy songs\nJay Sean songs\nSongs written by Billy Steinberg\nSongs written by Jay Sean\nSongs written by Josh Alexander\nSongs written by Israel Cruz\nVocal duets\nSony Music Australia singles\nSongs written by Khaled Rohaim"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life",
"What did he do after jail?",
"Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion.",
"What happened between 1990 and 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
What significant thing happened in 1994?
| 6 |
What significant thing happened in 1994 to Bruce?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"In cognitive therapy, decatastrophizing or decatastrophization is a cognitive restructuring technique to treat cognitive distortions, such as magnification and catastrophizing, commonly seen in psychological disorders like anxiety and psychosis.\n\nThe technique consists of confronting the worst-case scenario of a feared event or object, using mental imagery to examine whether the effects of the event or object have been overestimated (magnified or exaggerated) and where the patient's coping skills have been underestimated. The term was coined by Albert Ellis, and various versions of the technique have been developed, most notably by Aaron T. Beck.\n\nDecatastrophizing is also called the \"what if\" technique, because the worst-case scenario is confronted by asking: \"What if the feared event or object happened, what would occur then?\"\n\nThe following is an example:\n\"I could make an absolute fool of myself if I say the wrong thing.\"\n\"What if you say the wrong thing, what would happen then?\"\n\"He might think I'm weird.\" ...\n\nReferences \n\nCognitive therapy",
"The district Suriname is a former district of the country Suriname. The capital of this district was Paramaribo, though this city was located in the district Paramaribo.\n\nDistrict Suriname was created in 1927 by merging the districts:\n Lower Suriname\n Upper Suriname\n Lower Para\n Upper Para\n\nIn 1958 the district Brokopondo was split from district Suriname, and about ten years later the same thing happened with district Para.\n\nIn the middle of the 80s the district system of Suriname was reorganized and district Suriname ceased to exist. That what remained of district Suriname was divided in Commewijne, Para, Saramacca and the new district Wanica.\n\nReferences\n\nDistricts of Suriname"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life",
"What did he do after jail?",
"Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion.",
"What happened between 1990 and 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"What significant thing happened in 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
Did he win anything?
| 7 |
Did Bruce win anything?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| false |
[
"\"Anything\" is a song by rapper Jay-Z that is found on the Vinyl 12\" \"Anything (The Berlin Remixes)\" 1999 with a Remix of DJ Tomekk from Def Jam Germany and later on Beanie Sigel's 2000 album The Truth. It is produced by Sam Sneed and P. Skam, who sample Lionel Bart's \"I'll Do Anything\" for the track's beat and chorus. The sample from Oliver! heavily popularized \"Anything\", as did the Annie sample on \"Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)\", \"Anything\" was also a bonus track on Jay-Z's album Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter (UK/Europe edition) as is \"Anything (Mr. Drunk Mix)\" on the Japanese version of the album.\n\nJay-Z admitted to Angie Martinez in a 2009 interview on the BET program Food for Thought that he hoped the song would be a success like \"Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)\" due to their similarities but was surprised when it wasn't, even saying \"I dropped the record and then nothing\". The song did, however, achieve moderate success in the UK reaching #18 on the singles chart. A music video for the song was also released, which was directed by Chris Robinson.\n\n\"Anything (The Berlin Remixes)\"\n\nFormats and track listings\n\nVinyl 12\"\n\nA-side\n \"Anything (GBZ Remix)\"\t\t\n \"Anything (GBZ Remix Instrumental)\"\n\nB-side\n \"Anything (DJ Tomekk Remix)\"\t\n \"Anything (Original Version)\"\t\n \"Anything (Original Version Instrumental)\"\n\nFormats and track listings\n\nCD\n \"Anything (Radio Edit)\"\n \"So Ghetto\"\n \"There's Been a Murder\"\n \"Anything (Video)\"\n\nVinyl\n\nA-side\n \"Anything (Radio Edit) (3:47)\"\n \"Anything (LP Version) (4:47)\"\n \"Anything (Instrumental) (4:48)\"\n\nB-side\n \"Big Pimpin' (Radio Edit) (3:56)\"\n \"Big Pimpin' (LP Version) (4:44)\"\n \"Big Pimpin' (Instrumental) (4:59)\"\n\nCharts\n\nSee also\nList of songs recorded by Jay-Z\n\nReferences\n\n2000 singles\nJay-Z songs\nMusic videos directed by Chris Robinson (director)\nSongs written by Jay-Z\nSongs written by Lionel Bart\nRoc-A-Fella Records singles\n2000 songs",
"Lee Sheng-feng (; born 10 July 1953) is a Taiwanese politician.\n\nCareer\nLee was first elected to the Legislative Yuan in 1986, as a member of the Kuomintang. During his first year in office, he engaged in debate about the political status of Taiwan, and commented on the end of martial law, stating, \"It has made the entire society more lively. The political atmosphere has changed so that there are no taboos. We can talk and think about anything.\" He was reelected to a second term in 1989. Lee contested the 1993 Taipei County magisterial election as a member of the New Party, and lost the office to You Ching. With the support of the New Party, Lee was co-nominated by the Kuomintang in the elections of 2004, but did not win a legislative seat. He was placed on the New Party list in 2008, but did not win election to the Legislative Yuan via proportional representation. \n\nWithin the New Party, Lee has served as secretary-general, and as the national committee adviser.\n\nReferences\n\n1953 births\nLiving people\nNew Party (Taiwan) politicians\nKuomintang Members of the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan\nMembers of the 1st Legislative Yuan in Taiwan\nYunlin County Members of the Legislative Yuan\nTainan Members of the Legislative Yuan\nChiayi City Members of the Legislative Yuan\nChiayi County Members of the Legislative Yuan"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life",
"What did he do after jail?",
"Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion.",
"What happened between 1990 and 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"What significant thing happened in 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"Did he win anything?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
WHat else can you tell me about 1994?
| 8 |
What else happened in1994 to Bruce besides him competing for Midwest Championship Wrestling?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"Forever Young is Kaysha's album released 2009.\n\nTrack list\n\n Anti Bad Music Police\n Be With You\n Digital Sexyness\n Duro\n Fanta & Avocado\n Forever Young Intro\n Funky Makaku\n Glorious Beautiful\n Heaven\n Hey Girl\n I Give You the Music\n I Still Love You\n Joachim\n Kota Na Piste\n Les Belles Histoires D'amour\n Love You Need You\n Loving and Kissing\n Make More Dollars\n Nobody Else\n On Veut Juste Danser\n Once Again\n Outro\n Paradisio / Inferno\n Pour Toujours\n Pure\n Si Tu T'en Vas\n Simple Pleasures\n Tell Me What We Waiting For\n That African Shit\n The Sweetest Thing\n The Way You Move\n Toi Et Moi\n U My Bb\n Yes You Can\n You + Me\n You're My Baby Girl\n\n2009 albums",
"\"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" is the title of a number-one R&B single by singer Tevin Campbell. To date, the single is Campbell's biggest hit peaking at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spending one week at number-one on the US R&B chart. The hit song is also Tevin's one and only Adult Contemporary hit, where it peaked at number 43. The song showcases Campbell's four-octave vocal range from a low note of E2 to a D#6 during the bridge of the song.\n\nTrack listings\nUS 7\" vinyl\nA \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" (edit) – 4:16\t\nB \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" (instrumental) – 5:00\n\n12\" vinyl\nA \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" (edit) – 4:16\t\nB \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" (album version) – 5:02\n\nUK CD\n \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" – 4:16\n \"Goodbye\" (7\" Remix Edit) – 3:48\n \"Goodbye\" (Sidub and Listen) – 4:58\n \"Goodbye\" (Tevin's Dub Pt 1 & 2) – 6:53\n\nJapan CD\n \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" – 4:10\n \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" (instrumental version) – 4:10\n\nGermany CD\n \"Tell Me What You Want Me to Do\" (edit) – 4:10\n \"Just Ask Me\" (featuring Chubb Rock) – 4:07\n \"Tomorrow\" (A Better You, Better Me) – 4:46\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nSee also\nList of number-one R&B singles of 1992 (U.S.)\n\nReferences\n\nTevin Campbell songs\n1991 singles\n1991 songs\nSongs written by Tevin Campbell\nSongs written by Narada Michael Walden\nSong recordings produced by Narada Michael Walden\nWarner Records singles\nContemporary R&B ballads\nPop ballads\nSoul ballads\n1990s ballads"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life",
"What did he do after jail?",
"Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion.",
"What happened between 1990 and 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"What significant thing happened in 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"Did he win anything?",
"I don't know.",
"WHat else can you tell me about 1994?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
Is there anything else that happened with that?
| 9 |
Is there anything else that happened besides Bruce returning to the independent circuit?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"Ward v. Tesco Stores Ltd. [1976] 1 WLR 810, is an English tort law case concerning the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur (\"the thing speaks for itself\"). It deals with the law of negligence and it set an important precedent in so called \"trip and slip\" cases which are a common occurrence.\n\nFacts\nThe plaintiff slipped on some pink yoghurt in a Tesco store in Smithdown Road, Liverpool. It was not clear whether or not Tesco staff were to blame for the spillage. It could have been another customer, or the wind, or anything else. Spillages happened roughly 10 times a week and staff had standing orders to clean anything up straight away. As Lawton LJ observed in his judgment,\n\nThe trial judge had held in Mrs Ward's favour and she was awarded £137.50 in damages. Tesco appealed.\n\nJudgment\nIt was held by a majority (Lawton LJ and Megaw LJ) that even though it could not be said exactly what happened, the pink yoghurt being spilled spoke for itself as to who was to blame. Tesco was required to pay compensation. The plaintiff did not need to prove how long the spill had been there, because the burden of proof was on Tesco. Lawton LJ's judgment explained the previous case law, starting with Richards v. WF White & Co. [1957] 1 Lloyd's Rep.\n\nDissent\nOmrod LJ disagreed with Lawton LJ and Megaw LJ on the basis that Tesco did not seem to have been able to do anything to have prevented the accident. He argued that they did not fail to take reasonable care, and in his words, the accident \"could clearly have happened no matter what degree of care these defendants had taken.\"\n\nNotes\n\nEnglish tort case law\nEnglish occupier case law\nCourt of Appeal (England and Wales) cases\n1976 in case law\n1976 in British law\nTesco",
"In baseball, a fair ball is a batted ball that entitles the batter to attempt to reach first base. By contrast, a foul ball is a batted ball that does not entitle the batter to attempt to reach first base. Whether a batted ball is fair or foul is determined by the location of the ball at the appropriate reference point, as follows:\n\n if the ball leaves the playing field without touching anything, the point where the ball leaves the field;\n else, if the ball first lands past first or third base without touching anything, the point where the ball lands;\n else, if the ball rolls or bounces past first or third base without touching anything other than the ground, the point where the ball passes the base;\n else, if the ball touches anything other than the ground (such as an umpire, a player, or any equipment left on the field) before any of the above happens, the point of such touching;\n else (the ball comes to a rest before reaching first or third base), the point where the ball comes to a rest.\n\nIf any part of the ball is on or above fair territory at the appropriate reference point, it is fair; else it is foul. Fair territory or fair ground is defined as the area of the playing field between the two foul lines, and includes the foul lines themselves and the foul poles. However, certain exceptions exist:\n\n A ball that touches first, second, or third base is always fair.\n Under Rule 5.09(a)(7)-(8), if a batted ball touches the batter or his bat while the batter is in the batter's box and not intentionally interfering with the course of the ball, the ball is foul.\n A ball that hits the foul pole without first having touched anything else off the bat is fair.\n Ground rules may provide whether a ball hitting specific objects (e.g. roof, overhead speaker) is fair or foul.\n\nOn a fair ball, the batter attempts to reach first base or any subsequent base, runners attempt to advance and fielders try to record outs. A fair ball is considered a live ball until the ball becomes dead by leaving the field or any other method.\n\nReferences\n\nBaseball rules"
] |
[
"Violent J",
"Independent circuit (1990, 1994-2004)",
"What is the independent circuit?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"What happened significanti n 1990?",
"After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling.",
"Why did he go to jail?",
"gang life",
"What did he do after jail?",
"Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion.",
"What happened between 1990 and 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"What significant thing happened in 1994?",
"He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring.",
"Did he win anything?",
"I don't know.",
"WHat else can you tell me about 1994?",
"Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet.",
"Is there anything else that happened with that?",
"From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling."
] |
C_9892d289d2224c3aad12224ff71ff459_1
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 10 |
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article other than Bruce returning as Hector Hatchet?
|
Violent J
|
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J. Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling. In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004. CANNOTANSWER
|
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler.
|
Joseph Francis Bruce (born April 28, 1972), known by his stage name Violent J, is an American rapper, record producer, professional wrestler, and part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow ICP rapper Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Also along with Utsler, Bruce is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling.
Early life
Joseph Bruce is a native of Berkley, Michigan. He was the last born of three children. His father, Richard Bruce, stole all of the family's money and left when Bruce was two years old. Joe's mother, Linda, was forced to care for him and his siblings, Robert and Theresa, off the income she made as a janitor. At age seven, Joe and his brother caught a butterfly, and both were fascinated by the vibrant colors and overall peacefulness of the creature. They kept the butterfly in a jar overnight, and intended to free it the following morning. When they awoke, the brothers found the butterfly had died, and felt as if they had committed a murder. The brothers made a vow that "one day, [they] will make it to heaven, so that [they] can [...] apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face." On every Insane Clown Posse album and EP it reads "Dedicated to the Butterfly."
Bruce received all of his clothes from rummage sales, and his food from canned food drives held at his own school. After moving to Oak Park, Bruce met John Utsler, and his little brother Joey. He also began his gang life by reluctantly getting involved in criminal activity in Royal Oak Township. Along with John and Joey, Bruce got heavily into rap music. In 1989, Bruce, as Jagged Joe, Joseph Utsler, as Kangol Joe, and John Utsler, as Master J, released the single titled Party at the Top of the Hill under the name of JJ Boys, but they did not pursue a serious career in music.
Bruce dropped out of school in ninth grade, and moved in with his friend, Rudy, in River Rouge. There he formed his own gang called Inner City Posse, which would terrorize people with Army-issued tear gas and steal car radios for money. One night, Joe's mother, who had just moved to Ferndale, had her house attacked by rival gang, Hazel Park Posse (HPP), from Hazel Park. Fearing for his mother's life, Joe fled to Bonnie Doone, North Carolina, a trailer park town just outside Fort Bragg, where his brother was staying with the U.S. Army. It was there that Bruce witnessed the open racism which would later emerge as the hate for bigots referenced in Insane Clown Posse's lyrics.
At seventeen, Joe returned to Ferndale. He was soon jailed, and the experience convinced him to get away from gang life. In 1989, after a short career in professional wrestling, Bruce and his friend Dale Miettinen Jr. recorded Intelligence and Violence on a karaoke machine, which marked the debut of Bruce's stage name Violent J. Joe bought his own karaoke machine and, along with Joey and John Utsler, formed the music group Inner City Posse, named after their gang. After the release of the album Bass-Ment Cuts, the group hired record store owner Alex Abbiss as their manager, and established the Psychopathic Records record label with him in 1991.
Musical career
Solo career (1990–present)
In 1990, Bruce recorded his first solo release, Enter the Ghetto Zone, using two cassette players. One played the beat, while the other recorded, and Bruce stuck his head between the two and rapped. In 2003, Bruce released his second solo release Wizard of the Hood, which was an extended reference to the Wizard of the Hood songs which he recorded on Inner City Posse's Intelligence and Violence and Dog Beats, and Insane Clown Posse's Carnival of Carnage. In 2009, Bruce released the LP The Shining, which was initially given away for free at the 2008 Gathering of the Juggalos before being nationally released. During ICP's GOTJ 2013 seminar J and Shaggy stated that they were wanting to do solo albums. On December 10, 2015, with the release of "Phantom: X-tra Spooky" EP two flyers were released. One for Shaggy 2 Dope's new solo album titled "F.T.F.O.M.F." said to be released in 2016. The other flyer was for Violent J's new solo album titled "Karma Forest" said to be released in 2016.
Insane Clown Posse (1989-present)
In late 1991, Inner City Posse changed their style, look, and name. Bruce recalled a dream of a clown running around in Delray, which became the inspiration for the group's new name: Insane Clown Posse. Upon returning home that night, Bruce had a dream in which spirits in a traveling carnival appeared to him—an image that would become the basis for the Dark Carnival mythology detailed in the group's Joker's Cards series. These stories each offer a specific lesson designed to change the "evil ways" of listeners before "the end consumes us all." Insane Clown Posse has a dedicated following, often referred to by the group as Juggalos and Juggalettes.
John Utsler left the group about a month before the release of Carnival of Carnage and Insane Clown Posse has since been composed of Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform under the respective personas of the murderous, wicked clowns Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore, and is known for its dark, violent lyrics and elaborate live performances. Insane Clown Posse has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.
Golden Goldies (1995)
Golden Goldies was a comical group whose lyrics focused solely on gold. The group consisted of Psychopathic Record's employees and friends; Joseph Bruce (Golden Jelly), Joseph Utsler (Gold D), Robert Bruce (Golden Gram), Billy Bill (Gold Double B), Alex Abbiss (Gold Rocks), Mike E. Clark (Gold Digger), Rich Murrell (Golden Warrior), Frank Giammanco (Golden Frank), Keith Jex (Gold Teeth), Josh Silverstein (Rold Gold), Kelly Eubanks (Gold Spud), Dave Fink the East Side G (Golden Toby), and Matt Mackalantie (Gold Spakalantie). Their only LP, Gimme Them Fuckin' Nuggets Bitch, Or I'll Punch Your Fuckin' Face, was recorded in 1995 in a span of one week, and was not publicly released. Golden Goldies was a project put together by Insane Clown Posse for entertainment purposes only. To add more humor to the album, each artist was given only five minutes to write their verses, and had only one take to record them, which resulted in some artists messing up their lines, and lyrics containing "some very strange things." The group held only one live performance, which occurred at the record release party for Insane Clown Posse's Riddle Box.
Dark Lotus (1998-2017)
Formed in 1998, Dark Lotus consisted of Bruce and Utsler of Insane Clown Posse, Jamie Spaniolo and Paul Methric of Twiztid, and Chris Rouleau. Each member was said to "act as a 'petal' of the lotus," and it was announced that there would be six members. After switching between two different "sixth members," Marz, and Anybody Killa, Dark Lotus decided to keep the group to only five. On January 19, 2017, via an interview with Faygoluvers, Insane Clown Posse announced that the group disbanded.
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–present)
Psychopathic Rydas formed in 1999, and consists of Psychopathic Records-associated rappers performing under alternate stage names in the style of mainstream gangsta rap.<ref name="Valdivia">{{cite web |url= |title=Review of Psychopathic Rydas Dumpin |access-date=June 28, 2008 |last=Valdivia |first=Victor W. |website=Allmusic}}</ref> The group's current lineup consists of Bruce (Bullet), Utsler (Full Clip), Methric (Foe Foe), Spaniolo (Lil' Shank), Rouleau (Cell Block), Lowery (Sawed Off) and Hutto (Yung Dirt).
Psychopathic Rydas reuses the beats of popular rappers within the genre without paying to license the original songs or requesting permission from copyright owners to use the music, effectively making their albums bootlegs and resulting in the releases becoming difficult to find in some markets.
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005)
Formed in 2002, Soopa Villainz consisted of Detroit rappers L.A.V.E.L. (Mr. Heart), Bruce (Mr. Diamond), Esham (Mr. Spade) and Utsler (Mr. Club). The group made appearances on Insane Clown Posse's The Wraith: Shangri-La and Esham's Acid Rain and Repentance before releasing their debut album, Furious, in 2005. Following Esham and Lavel's departure from Psychopathic Records in October 2005, the group disbanded.
Style and influences
Bruce has cited the artists Esham, N.W.A, Ice Cube, Awesome Dre, Geto Boys, Gong, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson as influences on his music. Allmusic reviewer James Monger has referred to Bruce's style as an "onslaught of Midwest Dirty Rap."
Professional wrestling career
Early career (1983–1986)
Bruce began wrestling alongside his friends Joseph and John Utsler. The three got involved in backyard wrestling, and created two backyard wrestling rings for their made up promotion Tag Team Wrestling, later renamed National All-Star Wrestling. The trio staged National All-Star Wrestling's first show, NAW Wrestling Extravaganza, in front of friends and family. Among others, the show featured Bruce wrestling under the moniker Darryl "Dropkick" Daniels, and Joey Utsler wrestling as both Rhino, and the masked NAW World Champion White Tiger. Bruce stopped wrestling after becoming involved in gang life and forming Inner City Posse.
Independent circuit (1990, 1994–2004)
After being released from jail in 1990, Bruce decided to get away from gang life and start a career in professional wrestling. Bruce's friend, Rudy Hill, got him booked in a local wrestling promotion. Rudy had lied to the promoter by telling him that Bruce had been trained at the Chris Adams Wrestling School in Texas. At the event, Bruce met Rob Van Dam and Sabu, two other first-timers with whom he became very good friends. Bruce wrestled as Corporal Darryl Daniels, wearing a U.S. Army uniform that his brother had sent him while in the Gulf War, and had his first match against "Irish" Mickey Doyle at Azteca Hall in Southwest Detroit. Training alongside Rob Van Dam, Bruce went on to wrestle for Al Snow, including the event which featured the debut of Van Dam. After a short run in the business, Joe realized his dislike for the backstage politics, and decided to take up a career in music, taking the name Violent J.
Bruce returned to wrestling in the independent circuit in 1994, under the name Hector Hatchet. He competed for Midwest Championship Wrestling throughout the next year, wrestling in between recording sessions and touring. From 1996 to 1998, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Sewer Dwella in Insane Championship Wrestling. He continued to compete in several independent promotions for the next three years, including IWA Mid-South and NWA Mid American Wrestling.
In 2001, Bruce appeared in Xtreme Pro Wrestling at XPW Rapture to aid Utsler. After Bruce suffered a real-life injury from a sloppy clothesline, the duo left the company. On October 5, 2002, he and Utsler wrestled in Ring of Honor and defeated Oman Tortuga and Diablo Santiago. Bruce was later made a playable character in both Eidos Interactive's video games Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood as Violent J. To help promote the games, he competed in a series of matches for Backyard Wrestling in 2003 and 2004.
Extreme Championship Wrestling (1997)
In August 1997, Bruce received a telephone call from friends Rob Van Dam and Sabu. They asked if he and Utsler could appear on Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)'s second pay-per-view (PPV) program, Hardcore Heaven. The duo went to Florida to discuss the ECW program's content with Van Dam, Sabu, and Paul Heyman. Heyman was pleased that Bruce and Utsler were former wrestlers, which meant that they could surprise the crowd by taking bumps. Heyman also favored the idea of using Insane Clown Posse, because it was unlikely that anyone knew of the relationship the group had with Van Dam and Sabu. Heyman presented his idea to Bruce and Utsler, who agreed to participate. Insane Clown Posse opened the ECW program by performing songs and exciting the crowd. Then Van Dam and Sabu, the main villains at the time, attacked Bruce and Utsler. The top fan favorite, The Sandman, came in and saved them by chasing away Van Dam and Sabu with his signature Singapore cane.
ICP's Strangle-Mania Live (1997)
Being avid wrestling fans, Bruce and Utsler owned, and were fascinated by, the death match wrestling collection Outrageously Violent Wrestling from Japan. The duo decided to create a compilation of their favorite matches, recording their own sports announcing under the personas named "Handsome" Harley Guestella a.k.a. "Gweedo" (Utsler) and "Diamond Donovan Douglas" a.k.a. "3D" (Bruce). The compilation video was released nationwide under the title ICP's Strangle-Mania. The video's success allowed Bruce and Utsler to host their own wrestling show, ICP's Strangle-Mania Live, to a sold-out performance at St. Andrew's Hall. The main event featured Insane Clown Posse versus The Chicken Boys, who were played by two friends of Bruce and Utsler. With local wrestling booker Dan Curtis, other wrestlers such as Mad Man Pondo, 2 Tuff Tony, Corporal Robinson, King Kong Bundy, and Abdullah the Butcher were also booked on the show to wrestle in the same death match style as shown in ICP Strangle-Mania.
World Wrestling Federation (1998)
In 1998, Insane Clown Posse were asked by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to perform the entrance theme for the wrestling group The Oddities. The WWF also wanted Bruce and Utsler to appear on their SummerSlam pay-per-view (PPV) program in August 1998 and rap live while The Oddities entered the ring. Once the duo arrived at the arena, they realized their wrestling dreams had come true; they had been contacted by wrestling's top company and were now set to appear on their PPV program at the company's most historic venue, Madison Square Garden. Bruce and Utsler were assigned to the locker room with Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker, who were to wrestle during the main event that night. The duo immediately felt the animosity of the locker room that had previously driven them away from wrestling. Insane Clown Posse performed and was asked to return for the live broadcast of Monday Night Raw the following night. At the broadcast, Bruce and Utsler requested for more than just a rapping role; they wanted to wrestle. Vincent McMahon favored the idea and allowed them to participate.
Insane Clown Posse was put in a feud with The Headbangers. In the first wrestling match, The Headbangers were stiff, throwing real punches and kicks. In the rematch, a move was planned where The Headbangers would be flipped over by Bruce and Utsler. When the time came to flip over, however, The Headbangers refused to move, forcing Insane Clown Posse to genuinely flip them over and begin throwing punches. Realizing that the match was getting too heated, McMahon ended the feud after that match. Bruce and Utsler were put into other matches along with The Oddities. Vince Russo told Bruce and Utsler to "make it seem like you don't know anything about wrestling, and you guys keep choking and digging into their eyes". During this time, Bruce and Utsler had no contract with WWF. They, however, did have an agreement that the WWF would occasionally play Insane Clown Posse commercials, and in return, Bruce and Utsler would wrestle for free. Bruce and Utsler knew that airtime cost significantly more than any monetary compensation they would receive and were thus satisfied with the agreement. The duo were told they were to suddenly turn on The Oddities in their match against The Headbangers, then join them in beating up the group. They were also informed that their commercial would air the very next week, which had still not aired after three months of being involved with the WWF. The next week Insane Clown Posse and The Headbangers had a match with Steve Austin. Backstage, Austin made it clear to Bruce and Thrasher that Thrasher would receive the first Stone Cold Stunner, after which Bruce would turn around and receive the second. During the match, Austin gave Bruce the Stunner first, catching him off guard, thus having Bruce sell the move awkwardly. Although disappointed over the events during the match, Bruce and Utsler continued in hopes that McMahon would air the commercial as promised. Bruce and Utsler contacted Abbiss to inquire about the commercial and were informed that it was not aired. Given that McMahon failed to uphold his promise to air Insane Clown Posse's commercial, Abbiss recommended that Bruce and Utsler terminate their agreement with the WWF.
Hellfire Wrestling (1998)
While involved with the WWF, Insane Clown Posse brought Dan Curtis with them. After leaving the WWF, Curtis suggested that Insane Clown Posse start its own promotion while continuing with its music. He came to Bruce's house each night to discuss ideas about the promotion. Curtis convinced Bruce to coordinate another Strangle-Mania Live show, to be followed by an eighty-city "Hellfire Wrestling" tour. Curtis booked the talent and wrote the scripts. Strangle-Mania Live sold out the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Two days after the show, Curtis was found dead in his apartment, due to a sudden diabetic problem. The "Hellfire Wrestling" tour was subsequently canceled.
World Championship Wrestling (1999–2000)
Bruce then went on to wrestle a long stint in World Championship Wrestling with Shaggy 2 Dope. The duo formed two stables. The first stable, The Dead Pool, consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, and Raven; the second consisted of Insane Clown Posse, Vampiro, Great Muta, and Kiss Demon, known as The Dark Carnival.
On August 9, 1999, Insane Clown Posse made their WCW debut on Monday Nitro in a six-man tag team match. Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated Lash LeRoux, Norman Smiley, and Prince Iaukea. At Road Wild 1999, Rey Mysterio, Jr., Billy Kidman, and Eddie Guerrero defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. Insane Clown Posse continued to wrestle on Monday Nitro, defeating Public Enemy one week, and losing to Konnan and Rey Mysterio, Jr. another. At Fall Brawl 1999, the tag team of Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, and Billy Kidman again defeated Vampiro and Insane Clown Posse. On September 13, Insane Clown Posse defeated Lenny Lane and Lodi.
On the August 23, 2000, episode of WCW Thunder, Great Muta, Vampiro, and Insane Clown Posse beat Tank Abbott and 3 Count. Five days later, on Monday Nitro, Insane Clown Posse and Vampiro defeated 3 Count, and the following week, Rey Mysterio, Jr. and Juventud Guerrera beat Insane Clown Posse. On September 25, Mike Awesome defeated Insane Clown Posse in a Handicap Hardcore match.
Juggalo Championship Wrestling (1999–2006)
On December 19, 1999, Bruce and Utsler created their own wrestling promotion, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling (now known as Juggalo Championship Wrestling). That night, the duo defeated the team of two Doink the Clowns to become the first ever JCW Tag Team Champions. The event was taped and released as JCW, Volume 1. Commentary was provided by Bruce and Utsler under their "3D" and "Gweedo" announcing personas. In 2000, Insane Clown Posse was involved in a rivalry with The Rainbow Coalition (Big Flam, Bob, and Neil). That April, the duo teamed with Vampiro to defeat The Rainbow Coalition. They defeated the Coalition again when they teamed with Evil Dead later that year, and the match that was featured on JCW, Volume 2.
In 2003, Insane Clown Posse defended, and retained, their JCW Tag Team Championships against Kid Cock (a parody of Kid Rock) and Feminem (a parody of Eminem). The match was featured on JCW, Volume 3. At the 2006 Gathering of the Juggalos, Bruce, Nosawa, and Vampiro lost to Mad Man Pondo and The Headhunters, but defeated Pondo and Powers of Pain the next day. Bruce continued to wrestle for JCW, which could only be seen at live events until the 2007 start of JCW SlamTV!.
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (2004, 2006)
On January 21, 2004, Bruce appeared alongside Utsler on an episode of the weekly NWA Total Nonstop Action PPV. The duo were shown partying in the crowd alongside the Juggalos in attendance. In the main event of the night, which featured Jeff Jarrett going against El Leon, Jarrett and El Leon were fighting in the crowd when Insane Clown Posse sprayed Faygo in Jarrett's eyes. The following week, Insane Clown Posse were interviewed in the ring by Mike Tenay. The duo explained that they were fans of TNA, and that they wanted to be a part of the promotion themselves. As they started making kayfabe negative remarks toward Jarrett, Glenn Gilberti and David Young interrupted. When Gilberti tried to convince the duo to apologize to Jarrett, Insane Clown Posse chased Gilbertti and Young out of the ring before challenging the team to a match for the next week.
On February 4, Insane Clown Posse defeated Glen Gilbertti and David Young. Later that night, Scott Hudson interviewed Insane Clown Posse, and the duo announced that they would face whoever Jeff Jarrett threw at them next in a "Juggalo Street Fight". Insane Clown Posse won against the team of Glen Gilbertti and Kid Kash on February 18. Two weeks later, Insane Clown Posse announced that they would take part in a "Dark Carnival match" the next week against Glen Gilbertti and any partner he chooses. The following week, Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony took on Glen Gilbertti, Kid Kash, and David Young. "The Alpha Male" Monty Brown made his TNA return, and cost Insane Clown Posse and 2 Tuff Tony the match. During their stint in TNA, Insane Clown Posse brought the company its largest paying crowds in history. After the duo left, they remained close with the company.
On March 17, 2006, Insane Clown Posse hosted and booked TNA's first ever house show, which took place in Detroit, Michigan. The duo defeated Team Canada members Eric Young and Petey Williams.
Return to the independent circuit (2004–present)
On December 12, 2004, Bruce and Utsler competed in the event A Night of Appreciation for Sabu, teaming with the Rude Boy to defeat the team of Corporal Robinson, Zach Gowen, and Breyer Wellington. Utsler received surgery on his neck the following year, forcing Bruce to compete as a singles competitor and as a member of the Hatchet Boys, alongside Corporal Robinson and 2 Tuff Tony.
In late 2006, Bruce was involved in a rivalry with Pro Wrestling Unplugged. On November 18, he turned on Corporal Robinson, the then JCW Heavyweight Champion and PWU Hardcore Champion, provoking a series of matches between JCW and PWU. At Pro Wrestling Unplugged's "PWU vs JCW", Team PWU (The Backseat Boyz and Corporal Robinson) defeated Team JCW (2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, and Dyson Pryce). The following month, Team PWU (Trent Acid, Corporal Robinson, Johnny Kashmere, Pete Hunter, and Gary Wolfe) took on Team JCW (Nosawa, 2 Tuff Tony, Violent J, Mad Man Pondo, and Raven) in a War Games match. Raven, however, attacked both teams, provoking all members of Team PWU and Team JCW to join forces and attack Raven.
Bruce continues to appear as Violent J at various promotions in the independent circuit.
Return to JCW (2007–present)
In 2007, JCW launched SlamTV!. With it came the first broadcast of JCW since the three initial DVDs. Bruce returned to commentary as Diamond Donovan Douglas, and Utsler returned as "Handsome" Harley Guestella. 3D and Gweedo announced in an episode of SlamTV! that Insane Clown Posse had been stripped of the JCW Tag Team Championships due to them not defending the title. At the first annual Bloodymania, JCW's premier wrestling event, Insane Clown Posse teamed with Sabu to defeat Trent Acid and The Young Alter Boys w/ Annie Social the Nun.
Later that night, Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, and Violent J formed the Juggalo World Order (JWO). Shaggy 2 Dope, Nosawa, Kevin Nash, 2 Tuff Tony, and Sid Vicious later joined the group. On January 26, 2008, Bruce and Tony won the JCW Tag Team Championship. However, their victory was declared void, stricken from the record, and the title was vacated. On November 9, 2008, the Juggalo World Order (Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, 2 Tuff Tony, and Corporal Robinson) "invaded" Total Nonstop Action Wrestling's Turning Point PPV by purchasing front row tickets to the event. They proceeded to promote their faction by flashing their JWO jerseys, which each member had on, before being removed from the building.
At Bloodymania III, Juggalo World Order (Corporal Robinson, Scott Hall, Shaggy 2 Dope, Violent J, and Sid Vicious) defeated Trent Acid and the Alter Boys (Tim, Tom, Terry, and Todd). On February 10, 2011, Bruce took the on-screen role of commissioner of the company. During their GOTJ seminar on July 24, 2015, Violent J said he is hoping to wrestle again by next year but he wants to "get in a better space".
Acting career
Bruce starred in the Psychopathic Records crime comedy Big Money Hustlas, as Big Baby Sweets, in 2000. A sequel, Big Money Rustlas followed in 2010, in which Bruce portrayed Big Baby Sweets' ancestor, Big Baby Chips. In 2001, Bruce was offered a role in the musical Prison Song, in which he was asked to play a bigoted prison guard. The producers offered Bruce the role on the basis of his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, and told him that they wanted "a big white dude with urban slang to his voice", and on the basis of his radio appearances, thought that Bruce was perfect for the role. While Bruce had interest in acting outside of Psychopathic Records projects, as well as being willing to act without face paint, he did not want to play a racist, and turned the role down. In preparation for Big Money Rustlas, Bruce starred in the film Death Racers in 2008. According to Bruce, "We just did it for fun. We knew it was gonna be basically garbage."
Personal life
Family
Joe Bruce has two siblings: a younger sister, and an older brother, Jumpsteady, who was known as the "Psychopathic Records Don" from 1992 until he left in 2005 to become a paramedic. He regained the position when he returned in 2012. Jumpsteady has released 2 albums on Psychopathic Records (The Chaos Theory and Master of the Flying Guillotine). Bruce has one niece through Jumpsteady, named Samantha. Bruce has two children with ex-wife Michelle "Sugar Slam" Rapp: a son named Joseph "JJ" Bruce II, born in 2005, and a daughter named Ruby Bruce, born in 2006. Bruce and Rapp married on Father's Day, June 16, 2013. On the same day he released a single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)". In February 2016 it was announced in the Hatchet Herald that he and Sugar Slam decided to mutually separate, but will always remain good friends and will always put the needs of the other before their own. Bruce has recorded tracks specifically for his children entitled "Song 4 Son" for his son and "Ruby Song" for his daughter. In 2016 Bruce began dating artist Blahzay Roze, but they broke up later that year. On June 17, 2017, he released the music video for the 2013 Father's Day Single titled "Fuck My Dad (Richard Bruce)" and featured appearances from Lyte, Shaggy 2 Dope, Jumpsteady, their younger sister Denise, and Violent J's kids Ruby and JJ.
In support of his daughter's interest in the furry fandom, he declared himself "a juggalo furry" and attended Midwest Furfest with her in December 2018. During the convention, he sometimes dressed in a fursuit with sewn-in juggalo makeup made by "DraconicKnight".
In 2021 he announced he was suffering from heart failure and subsequently announced ICP's farewell world tour taking place the following year. He assures he will continue to play live when he is physically able.
Legal troubles
Bruce, along with his bandmate Joseph Utsler, has had numerous run-ins with the law, having been arrested multiple times starting at the age of seventeen:
Bruce was jailed for ninety days in 1989–1990 for death threats, robbery, and violating probation; this experience convinced him to reduce his involvement in gang life.
On November 16, 1997, Bruce was arrested on an aggravated battery charge after allegedly striking an audience member thirty times with his microphone at a concert in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bruce was held for four hours before being released on US$5,000 bail.
After a show in Indianapolis, Insane Clown Posse's tour bus stopped at a Waffle House in Greenfield, Indiana. When a customer began to harass Spaniolo and Bruce, a fight broke out between the customer and all of the bands' members. Months later on June 4, 1998, Bruce and Utsler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges (reduced from battery) in an Indiana court and were fined US$200 each. Members of Twiztid, Myzery, and Psycho Realm were charged with battery.
On June 15, 2001, Bruce was arrested in Columbia, Missouri for an outstanding warrant in St. Louis stemming from an incident in February 2001. That incident involved Insane Clown Posse allegedly attacking employees of a St. Louis radio station over disparaging remarks that a disc jockey made on the air. The police used several squad cars to detain Bruce, Utsler, and two associates a few miles from a venue where the group had completed a concert. Bruce was transferred to St. Louis the following day and released on bail without charge on June 18. On February 6, 2002, Bruce plead guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault in the second degree and was sentenced to 12 months' unsupervised probation.
Discography
Solo (1990–present)
Wizard of the Hood EP (July 22, 2003) (Psychopathic Records)
The Shining (April 28, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
Brother EP (E & J Tour - 01/03/2019-02/13/2019) (Psychopathic Records)
American Life/Lives (2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Walking Home (2021) (Psychopathic Records)
Karma Forest (TBA) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Dog Beats (February 4, 1991) (Psychopathic Records)
Carnival of Carnage (October 18, 1992) (Psychopathic Records)
Beverly Kills 50187 (July 16, 1993) (Psychopathic Records)
Ringmaster (January 28, 1994) (Psychopathic Records)
Riddle Box (October 10, 1995) (Psychopathic Records)
The Great Milenko (June 25, 1997) (Psychopathic Records)
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers (May 25, 1999) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizaar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
Bizzar (October 31, 2000) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Shangri-La (November 5, 2002) (Psychopathic Records)
The Wraith: Hell's Pit (August 31, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Tempest (March 20, 2007) (Psychopathic Records)
Bang! Pow! Boom! (September 1, 2009) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mighty Death Pop! (August 14, 2012) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost (April 28, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
The Marvelous Missing Link: Found (July 31, 2015) (Psychopathic Records)
Fearless Fred Fury (February 15, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Tales from the Lotus Pod (July 17, 2001) (Psychopathic Records)
Black Rain (April 6, 2004) (Psychopathic Records)
The Opaque Brotherhood (April 15, 2008) (Psychopathic Records)
The Mud, Water, Air & Blood (July 29, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Dumpin' (1999) (Joe & Joey Records)
Ryden Dirtay (GOTJ 2001) (Joe & Joey Records)
Check Your Shit In Bitch! (GOTJ 2004) (Joe & Joey Records)
Duk Da Fuk Down (GOTJ 2007) (Joe & Joey Records)
EatShitNDie (GOTJ 2011) (Joe & Joey Records)
w/Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
Furious (August 16, 2005) (Psychopathic Records)
T.B.A. (GOTJ 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
T.B.A. (July 5, 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
Reindeer Games (September 2, 2014) (Psychopathic Records)
w/The Loony Goons (2017–present)
T.B.A. (June 2019) (Psychopathic Records)
Group membership
JJ Boys (1988–1989)
Inner City Posse (1989–1991)
Insane Clown Posse (1991–present)
Golden Goldies (1995)
Dark Lotus (1998–2017)
Psychopathic Rydas (1999–2017)
Soopa Villainz (2002–2005; 2018–present)
The Bloody Brothers (2005; 2018–present)
The Killjoy Club (2013–2016; 2018)
The Loony Goons (2017–present)
Filmography
Big Money Hustlas (2000), as Big Baby Sweets/Ape Boy
Bowling Balls (2004), as J
Death Racers (2008), as Violent J
Big Money Rustlas (2010), as Big Baby Chips
Championships and accomplishmentsJuggalo Championship Wrestling'''
JCW Tag Team Championship – (3 times) with Shaggy 2 Dope (2, first) and 2 Tuff Tony (1)
BibliographyBehind the Paint'' by Violent J with Hobey Echlin (2003) – Autobiography
References
External links
1972 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American male film actors
American hip hop record producers
American male professional wrestlers
American color commentators
Horrorcore artists
Insane Clown Posse members
American clowns
Living people
Midwest hip hop musicians
People from Berkley, Michigan
Professional wrestlers from Michigan
Psychopathic Records artists
Rappers from Detroit
Underground rappers
Hardcore hip hop artists
People from Ferndale, Michigan
21st-century American rappers
Dark Lotus members
Psychopathic Rydas members
Rap rock musicians
Soopa Villainz members
| true |
[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral"
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
When did he die?
| 1 |
When did August Strindberg die?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
He died on 14 May 1912
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| true |
[
"Hagen Friedrich Liebing (18 February 1961 – 25 September 2016), nicknamed \"The Incredible Hagen\", was a German musician and journalist, best known as the bassist for the influential punk band Die Ärzte. \n\nIn 1986, drummer Bela B invited him to join Die Ärzte. The two knew each other from early Berlin punk days. The band disbanded in 1988. Liebing tried his hand at journalism shortly thereafter. He wrote several articles for Der Tagesspiegel, and was the senior music editor of Tip Berlin since the mid-1990s. \n\nWhen Die Ärzte reunited in 1993, Liebing did not join them. However, he did join them on stage as a special guest in 2002. In 2003, he published his memoirs The Incredible Hagen – My Years with Die Ärzte. From 2003 to 2010, he headed the Press and Public Relations at the football club Tennis Borussia Berlin. \n\nLiebing died in Berlin on 25 September 2016, after a battle with a brain tumor.\n\nReferences\n\n1961 births\n2016 deaths\nMusicians from Berlin\nGerman male musicians\nGerman journalists\nDeaths from cancer in Germany\nDeaths from brain tumor",
"Johann Karl Wezel (October 31, 1747 in Sondershausen, Germany – January 28, 1819 in Sondershausen), also Johann Carl Wezel, was a German poet, novelist and philosopher of the Enlightenment.\n\nLife\nBorn the son of domestic servants, Wezel studied Theology, Law, Philosophy and Philology at the University of Leipzig. Early philosophical influences include John Locke and Julien Offray de La Mettrie. After positions as tutor at the courts of Bautzen and Berlin, Wezel lived as a freelance writer. A short stay in Vienna did not result in him getting employed by the local national theater. He thus moved back to Leipzig and, in 1793, to Sondershausen, which he did not leave again until his death in 1819.\n\nAlthough his works were extremely successful when they were published, Wezel was almost forgotten when he died. His rediscovery in the second half of the 20th century is mainly due to German author Arno Schmidt who published a radio essay about him in 1959.\n\nWorks\n Filibert und Theodosia (1772)\n Lebensgeschichte Tobias Knauts, des Weisen, sonst der Stammler genannt: aus Familiennachrichten gesammelt (1773–1776)\n Der Graf von Wickham (1774)\n Epistel an die deutschen Dichter (1775)\n Belphegor oder die wahrscheinlichste Geschichte unter der Sonne (1776)\n Herrmann und Ulrike (1780)\n Appellation der Vokalen an das Publikum (1778)\n Die wilde Betty (1779)\n Zelmor und Ermide (1779)\n Tagebuch eines neuen Ehmanns (1779)\n Robinson Krusoe. Neu bearbeitet (1779)\n Ueber Sprache, Wißenschaften und Geschmack der Teutschen (1781)\n Meine Auferstehung (1782)\n Wilhelmine Arend oder die Gefahren der Empfindsamkeit (1782)\n Kakerlak, oder Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers aus dem vorigen Jahrhunderte (1784)\n Versuch über die Kenntniß des Menschen (1784–1785)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n1747 births\n1819 deaths\nPeople from Sondershausen\n\nGerman male writershuort escrouesr"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912"
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
How did he die?
| 2 |
How did August Strindberg die?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely.
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| true |
[
"How Not to Die may refer to:\n How Not to Die: Surprising Lessons on Living Longer, Safer, and Healthier from America’s Favorite Medical Examiner, a 2008 book by Jan Garavaglia\n How Not To Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease, a 2015 book by Michael Greger",
"Die Mannequin is a Canadian alternative rock band from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, founded by guitar player and singer Care Failure (born Caroline Kawa) in 2005. The band has toured across Canada several times, opening for Buckcherry, Guns N' Roses, Marilyn Manson and Sum 41. They have also toured Europe on several occasions, alone and as an opening act for Danko Jones in 2008.\n\nHistory\nRising from the ashes of Care Failure's first four-piece band \"The Bloody Mannequins\", Die Mannequin started in the spring of 2006 when Failure recorded her first EP, How to Kill, on How To Kill Records/Cordless Recordings. She sang, played guitar and bass on this EP because she did not have a permanent backing band at that time. Death from Above 1979's Jesse F. Keeler took care of the drum duties as well as production. The E.P. featured four songs and was produced by Keeler and partner Al-P from MSTRKRFT and was mastered by Ryan Mills at Joao Carvalho Mastering. Care Failure was also a member of the supergroup The Big Dirty Band, which included members from the Canadian hardrock band Rush, amongst others. They have recorded a cover version and video of The Bobby Fuller Four song I Fought The Law. This video also featured Anthony Useless, even though he did not play on any of the recordings. It was featured as a soundtrack to the 2006 movie Trailer Park Boys: The Movie.\n\nFailure later hired two of her longtime friends, Ethan Deth (of Toronto band Kïll Cheerleadër) and Pat M. (a.k.a. Ghostwolf), to play bass and drums. Deth was quickly replaced by Anthony \"Useless\" Bleed, also from Kïll Cheerleadër. He played bass guitar and provided backing vocals. Managed by Shull Management, Die Mannequin signed with EMI Publishing in the summer of 2006, and began their own record label, How To Kill Records which is distributed by Warner Music Canada. They were booked as one of the opening bands for Guns N' Roses' eastern leg of their 2006 North-American tour.\n\nDie Mannequin released a new EP in the fall of 2007 entitled Slaughter Daughter. Two tracks, \"Do It Or Die\" and \"Saved By Strangers\", were produced by Ian D'Sa of Billy Talent. The other two tracks, \"Upside Down Cross\" and \"Lonely Of A Woman\", were produced by Junior Sanchez. There was also a live recording of \"Open Season\" included on this EP. The band released a video for the first single, \"Do it or Die\", which entered rotation on Much Music and Much Loud.\n\nBoth EPs have been collected on a single disc entitled Unicorn Steak which features two unreleased songs: an early demo of \"Empty's Promise\" and the cover of the Beatsteaks song Hand in Hand. A video was also recorded after the release of Unicorn Steak, for the song \"Saved By Strangers\", directed by Canadian director Bruce McDonald. He has also directed a documentary about Die Mannequin, entitled The Rawside of Die Mannequin, which premiered at Toronto's North By North East festival on June 15, 2008.\n\nIn 2009 Die Mannequin took part in a documentary series called City Sonic. The series, which featured 20 Toronto artists, had Care Failure reflecting on her memories of CFNY, 102.1 the Edge.\n\nOn September 8, 2009, Die Mannequin released FINO + BLEED, mixed by Mike Fraser.\n\nIn 2009, they opened for the Canadians dates of the Marilyn Manson's The High End of Low Tour.\n\nOn March 21, 2012, Die Mannequin announced on their website that they would be releasing new music mid April, along with a new single and music video. This coincided with the release of Hard Core Logo 2.\n\nOn August 20, 2014, the band released a single for their upcoming album, titled \"Sucker Punch\". Their second full-length album, Neon Zero was released on October 28, 2014. Exclaim! Magazine called it 'evil dance metal'.\n\nMembers\nCurrent members\nCaroline \"Care Failure\" Kawa - vocals, guitar, bass (2005–present)\nKevvy Mental - bass, backing vocals (2015–present)\nKeith Heppler - drums, percussion (2015–present)\nJ.C. Sandoval - guitar, backing vocals (2015–present)\nFormer members\nAnthony \"Useless\" Bleed - bass, backing vocals (2006–2014)\nDazzer Scott - drums, percussion (2009–2014)\nStacy Stray - guitar, backing vocals (2009–2014)\nEthan Kath - bass (2006)\nGhostwolf - drums, percussion (2006–2009)\n\nSession members\nJesse F. Keeler - drums, percussion (on How To Kill EP)\nJack Irons - drums, percussion (on Fino + Bleed)\n\nDiscography\nDie Mannequin has released two recognized albums to date and two EPs.\n\nSingles\n\nStudio albums\nFino + Bleed (2009)\nNeon Zero (2014)\n\nCompilations\nUnicorn Steak (2008)\n\nEPs\nHow To Kill (2006)\nSlaughter Daughter (2007)\nDanceland (2012) No. 76 CAN\n\nSoundtracks\n\nInterviews\nDie Mannequin gets darker and warns of Toronto rapist - From Torontomusicscene.ca\n\nSee also\n\nMusic of Canada\nCanadian rock\nList of Canadian musicians\nList of bands from Canada\n:Category:Canadian musical groups\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nCare Failure Interview – Truth Mag\nDie Mannequin Neon Zero\n\nMusical groups established in 2005\nMusical groups from Toronto\nCanadian punk rock groups\nCanadian alternative rock groups\nCordless Recordings artists\n2005 establishments in Ontario"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912",
"How did he die?",
"During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely."
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
When was his funeral
| 3 |
When was August Strindberg's funeral
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May.
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| true |
[
"A funeral train carries a coffin or coffins (caskets) to a place of interment by railway. Funeral trains today are often reserved for leaders, national heroes, or government officials, as part of a state funeral, but in the past were sometimes the chief means of transporting coffins and mourners to graveyards. Many modern era funeral trains are hauled by operationally restored steam locomotives, due to the more romantic image of the steam train against more modern diesel or electric locomotives, however non-steam powered funeral trains have been used.\n\nHistory\n\nThe first funeral train was run by The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company on 7 November 1854. Trains ran once a day from London Necropolis railway station to Brookwood Cemetery. The train carried not only the bodies of the dead, but the parties of mourners who had come to attend the funeral services. Different classes were available for both the living and the dead; a more expensive first class ticket would provide a more ornate coffin and greater care of the body during transit. The London Necropolis Railway was run on the tracks of the London and South Western Railway, who feared that regular passengers would shun locomotives which had previously hauled funeral trains, and therefore purchased an entirely new fleet exclusively for the Necropolis line. The public were initially reserved about the project; one bishop expressed fears that \"It may sometimes happen that persons of opposite characters might be carried in the same conveyance. For instance, the body of some profligate spendthrift might be placed in a conveyance with the body of some respectable member of the church, which would shock the feelings of his friends\". Others felt that the railway industry, which was less than 20 years old and still very much a new technology, was too hectic and loud, ill-befitting the sombre mourning associated with Christian funeral services.\n\nThe line ran daily – including Sundays – for almost 50 years until 1900, when the Sunday service was stopped and trains began to run on an \"as needed basis\". The railway remained in operation through the First World War and Second World War until 16 April 1941, when the London Necropolis station was bombed in the London Blitz. The station was never rebuilt and the line fell into disuse.\n\nWhen West Norwood railway station opened two years later it was sited near to the gates of South London Metropolitan Cemetery, founded twenty years earlier; pall-bearers would unload the coffin from its \"Funeral special\" and simply carry it from the side entrance to the main gates. While this practice is long discontinued, the side gates still remain.\n\nFollowing the 1947 nationalisation of Britain's railways, the use of the railway to transport coffins went into steep decline. New operating procedures required that coffins be carried in a separate carriage from other cargo; as regular services to Brookwood station used electric multiple unit trains which did not have goods vans, coffins for Brookwood had to be shipped to Woking and then carried by road for the last part of the journey, or a special train had to be chartered. The last railway funeral to be carried by British Rail anywhere was that of Lord Mountbatten in September 1979, and from 28 March 1988 British Rail formally ceased to carry coffins altogether. Since Mountbatten, the only railway funeral to be held in the United Kingdom has been that of former National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers General Secretary Jimmy Knapp, carried from London to Kilmarnock for burial in August 2001.\n\nAustralia\n\nIn Sydney, Australia, there was a similar service whereby the Rookwood Cemetery railway line served the Rookwood Cemetery complex. From 1867 until 1948 trains would depart Mortuary Station in Sydney City and travel the 15 km to Rookwood Cemetery.\n\nIn Melbourne funeral services operated to the Springvale Necropolis along the dedicated Spring Vale Cemetery railway, while the Fawkner Cemetery was served by trains to Fawkner station.\n\nFinland\n\nIn Helsinki, a 2 km long side track ran from the Malmi railroad station to the Malmi cemetery, which had its own railroad station. Coffins were transported to the cemetery from Harju morgue in Kallio. The track was decommissioned in 1954, and has been removed, but the Malmi cemetery station building still exists.\n\nGermany \nThe Berlin Friedhofsbahn (Cemetery Line), opened in 1913, ran from Berlin-Wannsee station to Stahnsdorf's Forest Cemetery, about 20 kilometres southwest of Central Berlin. It was serviced by both funeral trains with passenger and hearse carriages, as well as regular S-Bahn (suburban rail) services. Funeral train service ended in 1952 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 spelled the end for cross-border S-Bahn services.\n\nState funerals\n\nAlthough most funeral services now make use of road-going hearses rather than trains, funeral trains remain common for the funerals of heads of state.\n\nUK: All British monarchs since Queen Victoria have been carried by funeral trains; King Edward VII and King George VI were both taken to the Windsor & Eton Central railway station for the funeral procession. Most British Prime Ministers do not receive funeral trains. However, as part of his state funeral, Winston Churchill's coffin was carried by a special train hauled by the Southern Railway \"Battle of Britain\" class locomotive Winston Churchill from Waterloo to , the closest station both to St Martin's Church, Bladon, where Churchill was buried, and to Blenheim Palace.\n\nRussia: In 1894, the body of Tsar Alexander III, was transported by train from Livadia Palace in the Crimea, back to St. Petersburg, by way of Moscow. On 23 January 1924, the body of Vladimir Lenin was carried by funeral train to Moscow Paveletskaya railway station. Later Museum of Lenin Funeral train was established in the rail terminal building. This is now the Museum of the Moscow Railway.\n\nIn the USA Presidents transported in funeral trains were Abraham Lincoln (April 1865), James Garfield (1881), Ulysses S. Grant (1885), William McKinley (1901), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1945), and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1969) \n\nSenator Robert F. Kennedy's body was brought by train from New York City to Washington DC following his assassination in 1968, a crowd estimated at one million lined the trackside. It was hauled by two Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 electrics. On June 5, 2013, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, an advocate of public transit and Amtrak, was transported from Secaucus Junction to Washington.\n\nGeorge H.W. Bush's funeral train (December 2018) carried him from Westfield, Texas to the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he was buried. Union Pacific selected 4141 and 9096 to transport Bush. 4141 is an EMD SD70ACe diesel locomotive that had been previously painted in a \"George Bush 41\" scheme in the style of Air Force One had been dedicated to Bush when he and his wife Barbara toured the locomotive unit at its unveiling ceremony in 2005.\n\nCanadian Prime Minister Sir John Alexander Macdonald (Canadian Pacific Railway), John Diefenbaker and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Via Rail) had their bodies transported by train.\n\nFounder of the Republic of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's coffin was transported to the capital Ankara by a funeral train from İzmit where it was brought to on the battlecruiser Yavuz, ex SMS Goeben.\n\nThe last times a funeral train was used at a state funeral in Denmark were on 24 January 1972, when King Frederik IX of Denmark was taken from Christiansborg Palace Chapel via Copenhagen Central Station to Roskilde Cathedral, and on 14 November 2000, when his widow Queen Ingrid was taken along the same route. Queen Ingrid's funeral, including the train transfer with a steam engine, is documented in a lengthy report by Danish television and available online.\n\nRomania: King Michael I of Romania was given a state funeral on 16 December 2017. At the conclusion of the ceremonies in Bucharest, the coffin was taken from Băneasa railway station to Curtea de Argeș railway station on board the royal train for burial in Curtea de Argeş.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n The Mortuary Train to Rookwood - A Recollection of the Mortuary Train\n State Records New South Wales - Images of Mortuary Station\n Funeral Train of Abraham Lincoln\n\nTrain\nTrains",
"\"The Funeral\" is a song credited to Hank Williams with words from Will Carleton. It was released as a single under the pseudonym Luke the Drifter by MGM Records in 1950.\n\nBackground\nAlthough credited to Williams, \"The Funeral\" had existed for years as a poem written by Will Carleton and recounts a black child's funeral. T. Texas Tyler, who had scored a big hit with the recitation \"Deck of Cards\" in 1948, had recorded a version of the song titled \"Colored Child's Funeral\" around the same time as Williams recorded it, as did East Coast deejay Buddy Starcher. It is one of the few Hank Williams recordings that has not aged well, as biographer Colin Escott observes:\n\n\"By today's standards, 'The Funeral' was an uncomfortably patronizing account of a black child's funeral service. Originally a poem by Will Carleton, it was first published in August 28, 1886 in Harper's Weekly. Unlike Starcher and Tyler, though, Hank delivered 'The Funeral' in his regular voice, and was clearly extending every ounce of compassion within him. His sincerity, though, was undermined by the words...\"\n\nWilliams recorded the song in Nashville at Castle Studio at the first Luke the Drifter session on January 9, 1950 with Fred Rose producing. He was backed on the session by Don Helms (steel guitar), Hillous Butrum (bass), and probably Owen Bradley or Rose (organ) Guitarist Bob McNett, who attended the session, later recalled that both Williams and Don Helms had tears in their eyes after they had finished recording: \"'The Funeral' really touched him. When he did it, he lost himself in it.\" It was released as a single in 1950 with \"Beyond the Sunset as the B-side. It also appeared on the 1953 posthumous LP Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter.\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n\nHank Williams songs\n1950 songs\nSong recordings produced by Fred Rose (songwriter)\nSongs written by Hank Williams\nMGM Records singles"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912",
"How did he die?",
"During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely.",
"When was his funeral",
"the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May."
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
Who all came
| 4 |
Who all came to August Strindberg's funeral?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament,
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| false |
[
"Phillip Maddock (born 9 October 1961) is a former Australian rules footballer who played with Geelong in the Victorian Football League (VFL).\n\nMaddock, who came from Winchelsea, played in three reserves premierships with Geelong (1980, 1981, 1982). His three senior appearances for Geelong all came in the 1982 VFL season, rounds three to five, before he dropped out of the team with knee re-constructions.\n\nHe was captain of St Peters in 1985.\n\nReferences\n\n1961 births\nAustralian rules footballers from Victoria (Australia)\nGeelong Football Club players\nLiving people",
"The Man Who Came Back may refer to\n\n The Man Who Came Back (play), 1916 Broadway play by Jules Eckert Goodman\n The Man Who Came Back (1924 film), American film directed by Emmett J. Flynn\n The Man Who Came Back (1931 film), American film\n \"The Man Who Came Back\" (UFO), UFO episode\n The Man Who Came Back (2008 film), American film"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912",
"How did he die?",
"During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely.",
"When was his funeral",
"the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May.",
"Who all came",
"The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament,"
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 5 |
Other than when and how August Strindberg died, and information about his funeral, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds,
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| true |
[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912",
"How did he die?",
"During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely.",
"When was his funeral",
"the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May.",
"Who all came",
"The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds,"
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
What else was his wishes
| 6 |
Other than starting the funeral at 8 a.m. to avoid crowds, what were August Strindberg's other last wishes?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body,
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| true |
[
"\"What Else Is There?\" is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp's second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.\n\nThe single was used in an O2 television advertisement in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia during 2008. It was also used in the 2006 film Cashback and the 2007 film, Meet Bill. Trentemøller's remix of \"What Else is There?\" was featured in an episode of the HBO show Entourage.\n\nThe song was covered by extreme metal band Enslaved as a bonus track for their album E.\n\nThe song was listed as the 375th best song of the 2000s by Pitchfork Media.\n\nOfficial versions\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Album Version) – 5:17\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Radio Edit) – 3:38\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Jacques Lu Cont Radio Mix) – 3:46\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Vocal Version) – 8:03\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Dub Version) – 7:51\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Mix) – 8:25\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Edit) – 4:50\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Remix) (Radio Edit) – 3:06\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Trentemøller Remix) – 7:42\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Vitalic Remix) – 5:14\n\nResponse\nThe single was officially released on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The single had a limited release on 21 November 2005 to promote the upcoming album. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number 32, while on the UK Dance Chart, it reached number one.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was directed by Martin de Thurah. It features Norwegian model Marianne Schröder who is shown lip-syncing Dreijer's voice. Schröder is depicted as a floating woman traveling across stormy landscapes and within empty houses. Dreijer makes a cameo appearance as a woman wearing an Elizabethan ruff while dining alone at a festive table.\n\nMovie spots\n\nThe song is also featured in the movie Meet Bill as characters played by Jessica Alba and Aaron Eckhart smoke marijuana while listening to it. It is also part of the end credits music of the film Cashback.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nRöyksopp songs\nAstralwerks singles\nSongs written by Svein Berge\nSongs written by Torbjørn Brundtland\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Roger Greenaway\nSongs written by Olof Dreijer\nSongs written by Karin Dreijer",
"\"III Wishes\" is a song by English rock band Terrorvision, which was released in 1999 as the third and final single from their fourth studio album Shaving Peaches. The song was written by Terrorvision and produced by John Cornfield. \"III Wishes\" reached No. 42 in the UK Singles Chart and remained in the Top 100 for two weeks.\n\nBackground\n\"III Wishes\" failed to live up to the expectations of EMI after the band's success with the UK No. 2 hit \"Tequila\" earlier in the year. When \"III Wishes\" stalled at No. 42 in the UK Singles Chart, EMI dropped the band.\n\nAccording to vocalist Tony Wright, distribution and stock issues hindered the song's success. He told Metal Express Radio in 2013, \"When people say 'Tequila' was a bit of luck, it wasn't. It was 15 years of hard graft and given to a numpty at the label who couldn't even get the follow up single into the shops and we lost all that momentum because of that.\"\n\nA music video was filmed to promote the single. The band also performed the song on The Pepsi Chart Show, which was broadcast on Channel 5 on 13 May 1999.\n\nCritical reception\nOn its release as a single, Ian Hyland of the Sunday Mirror picked \"III Wishes\" as one of the \"singles of the week\" and gave it an 8 out of 10 rating. He wrote, \"Not as catchy as 'Tequila' but just as easy to remember after you've had a few. Grin and swear it.\" The Evening Standard wrote, \"A lovely crunchy bassline, meaty, spirited, roaring, and a song which seems to be made up entirely of its chorus\". They added, \"Nothing like as annoyingly naff as 'Tequila', their last hit.\"\n\nTrack listing\nCassette single\n\"III Wishes\" (Radio Edit) – 3:31\n\"Tequila\" (Mint Royale Shot) – 4:09\n\"Moonage Daydream\" – 4:11\n\nCD single (UK #1)\n\"III Wishes\" (Radio Edit) – 3:31\n\"Tequila\" (Mint Royale Shot) – 4:09\n\"If That's What It Takes\" – 2:41\n\nCD single (UK #2)\n\"III Wishes\" (Radio Edit) – 3:31\n\"III Wishes\" (Scuba Z Remix) – 3:37\n\"100 Things\" – 2:47\n\nCD single (UK promo #1)\n\"III Wishes\" (Radio Edit) – 3:31\n\nCD single (UK promo #2)\n\"III Wishes\" (Radio Edit) – 3:31\n\"III Wishes\" (Scuba Z Remix) – 3:37\n\"III Wishes\" (Arthur Baker Remix) – 3:37\n\nPersonnel\nCredits are adapted from the UK CD1 and CD2 liner notes and the Shaving Peaches booklet.\n\nTerrorvision\n Tony Wright – lead vocals, backing vocals\n Mark Yates – electric guitar, acoustic guitar\n Leigh Marklew – bass\n Ian \"Shutty\" Shuttleworth – drums, percussion\n\nProduction\n John Cornfield – producer and mixing on \"III Wishes\"\n Terrorvision – producers and mixing on \"Moonage Daydream\" and \"100 Things\", producers on \"If That's What It Takes\"\n Pat Grogan – producer and mixing on \"Moonage Daydream\" and \"100 Things\"\n Edwyn Collins – producer on \"Tequila\"\n Scuba Z, Arthur Baker – remixes of \"III Wishes\"\n\nOther\n AP;D – design\n Rob White – photography\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n1998 songs\n1999 singles\nTerrorvision songs\nEMI Records singles"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912",
"How did he die?",
"During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely.",
"When was his funeral",
"the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May.",
"Who all came",
"The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds,",
"What else was his wishes",
"only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body,"
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
Did he have a wife
| 7 |
Did August Strindberg have a wife?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper,
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| true |
[
", son of Konoe Iehiro and adopted son of Takatsukasa Kanehiro, was a kugyō or Japanese court noble of the Edo period (1603–1868). He did not hold regent positions sesshō and kampaku. He and his wife did not have a son, but they adopted one Hisasuke.\n\nReferences\n \n\n1710 births\n1730 deaths\nFujiwara clan\nTakatsukasa family",
"The Elf Maiden is a Sámi fairy tale, collected by J. C. Poestion in Lapplandische Märchen. Andrew Lang included it in The Brown Fairy Book.\n\nSynopsis\n\nOnce upon a time, two men fell in love with the same maiden. One day, on a fishing expedition to an island, one of them noticed she favored the other, and so he tricked the other into staying behind. \n\nThe man, stranded on the island, survived there until Christmas, when he saw a small boat approach, on which were two young women, who were better dressed than the others. The two young maidens saw the man sitting by a bundle of sticks, and one of them, to find out what he was made of, pinched him. As she did, her fingers caught a pin, and it drew blood. The rest of the company fled, leaving behind the maiden and a ring of keys. The maiden told the man that he had drawn her blood and now must marry her. The man objected, arguing that they could not survive on this island, but the maiden promised to provide for them both. Thus he agreed to married her, and she kept her word, and did provide for them, though he never saw how.\n\nWhen the man's people returned to fish, they landed on the far side of the island at night. The maiden, now the man's wife, told him not to stir no matter what he heard. A great clatter, like carpentry, arose, and the man nearly jumped up before he remembered. In the morning the man found that a fine house had been built for them. His wife then told him to pick a place for a cow-shed though they had no cows, and, the following morning, he found it was built in the same manner.\n\nHis wife then took him to visit her parents. The man and his wife were made welcome, but when it came time to leave, the man's wife warned him to jump quickly over the threshold, and not turn around until he was inside their home, whatever he heard. The man did, though as he did, his wife's father threw a hammer at him that would have broken his legs if he had not moved quickly. Even though he heard cattle following, the man did not look back. When he had his hand on the door, he thought he was safe, and looked, but by then half of the cows had vanished. Still, there were enough for them both to be rich.\n\nThe man's wife vanished from time to time. When the man asked her why, his wife told him that she went against her will, but if he drove a nail into the threshold, she would remain all the time, so he did. And so she did. And they lived happily ever after.\n\nExternal links\nThe Elf Maiden\n\nSámi fairy tales\nElves\nFemale characters in fairy tales"
] |
[
"August Strindberg",
"Death and funeral",
"When did he die?",
"He died on 14 May 1912",
"How did he die?",
"During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely.",
"When was his funeral",
"the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May.",
"Who all came",
"The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds,",
"What else was his wishes",
"only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body,",
"Did he have a wife",
"the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper,"
] |
C_1766e31fc8054f9d84ac10183e72adc5_1
|
Who were his children
| 8 |
Who were August Strindberg's children?
|
August Strindberg
|
Strindberg died shortly after the first of his plays was staged in the United States--The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by Edith and Warner Oland. During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also started to suffer from a stomach cancer. The last weeks of his life were painful, and the daily papers in Stockholm reported on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63. Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Soderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, and members of Parliament, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.
The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.
During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's , that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
Biography
Youth
Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealized maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.
Strindberg spent the next few years in Uppsala and Stockholm, alternately studying for examinations and trying his hand at non-academic pursuits. As a young student, Strindberg also worked as an assistant in a pharmacy in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden. He supported himself in between studies as a substitute primary-school teacher and as a tutor for the children of two well-known physicians in Stockholm. He first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. In May 1869, he failed his qualifying chemistry examination which in turn made him uninterested in schooling.
1870s
Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays. It was at this time that he first learnt about the ideas of Charles Darwin. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms taken from runes of the ancient Teutonic alphabet – Strindberg called himself Frö (Seed), after the god of fertility. After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn. The play was accepted by the Royal Theatre, where it premièred on 13 September 1870. As he watched it performed, he realised that it was not good and felt like drowning himself, though the reviews published the following day were generally favourable. That year he also first read works of Søren Kierkegaard and Georg Brandes, both of whom influenced him.
Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse. During the Christmas holiday of 1870–71, he re-wrote a historical tragedy, Sven the Sacrificer, as a one-act play in prose called The Outlaw. Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802). Following further revision in the summer, The Outlaw opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871. Despite hostile reviews, the play earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler. Towards the end of the year Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, a play about Olaus Petri called Master Olof. In September 1872, the Royal Theatre rejected it, leading to decades of rewrites, bitterness, and a contempt for official institutions. Returning to the university for what would be his final term in the spring, he left on 2 March 1872, without graduating. In Town and Gown (1877), a collection of short stories describing student life, he ridiculed Uppsala and its professors.
Strindberg embarked on his career as a journalist and critic for newspapers in Stockholm. He was particularly excited at this time by Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization and the first volume of Georg Brandes' Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature. From December 1874, Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library. That same month, Strindberg offered Master Olof to Edvard Stjernström (the director of the newly built New Theatre in Stockholm), but it was rejected. He socialised with writers, painters, journalists, and other librarians; they often met in the Red Room in Bern's Restaurant.
Early in the summer of 1875, he met Siri von Essen, a 24-year-old aspiring actress who, by virtue of her husband, was a baroness – he became infatuated with her. Strindberg described himself as a "failed author" at this time: "I feel like a deaf-mute," he wrote, "as I cannot speak and am not permitted to write; sometimes I stand in the middle of my room that seems like a prison cell, and then I want to scream so that walls and ceilings would fly apart, and I have so much to scream about, and therefore I remain silent." As a result of an argument in January 1876 concerning the inheritance of the family firm, Strindberg's relationship with his father was terminated (he did not attend his funeral in February 1883). From the beginning of 1876, Strindberg and Siri began to meet in secret, and that same year Siri and her husband divorced. Following a successful audition that December, Siri became an actress at the Royal Theatre. They married a year later, on 30 December 1877; Siri was seven months pregnant at the time. Their first child was born prematurely on 21 January 1878 and died two days later. On 9 January 1879, Strindberg was declared bankrupt. In November 1879, his novel The Red Room was published. A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While receiving mixed reviews in Sweden, it was acclaimed in Denmark, where Strindberg was hailed as a genius. As a result of The Red Room, he had become famous throughout Scandinavia. Edvard Brandes wrote that the novel "makes the reader want to join the fight against hypocrisy and reaction." In his response to Brandes, Strindberg explained that:
1880s
Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880. Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 (his first première in nine years); Siri played Margaretha. That spring he formed a friendship with the painter Carl Larsson. A collected edition of all of Strindberg's previous writings was published under the title Spring Harvest. From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper. In April he began work on The Swedish People, a four-part cultural history of Sweden written as a series of depictions of ordinary people's lives from the 9th century onwards, which he undertook mainly for financial reasons and which absorbed him for the next year; Larsson provided illustrations. At Strindberg's insistence, Siri resigned from the Royal Theatre in the spring, having become pregnant again. Their second daughter, Greta, was born on 9 June 1881, while they were staying on the island of Kymmendö. That month, a collection of essays from the past ten years, Studies in Cultural History, was published. Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews. While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler. In March 1882 he wrote in a letter to Josephson: "My interest in the theatre, I must frankly state, has but one focus and one goal – my wife's career as an actress"; Josephson duly cast her in two roles the following season.
Having returned to Kymmendö during the summer of 1882, Strindberg wrote a collection of anti-establishment short stories, The New Kingdom. While there, to provide a lead role for his wife and as a reply to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), he also wrote Sir Bengt's Wife, which opened on 25 November 1882 at the New Theatre. He moved to Grez-sur-Loing, just south of Paris, France, where Larsson was staying. He then moved to Paris, which they found noisy and polluted. Income earned from Lucky Peter's Journey enabled him to move to Switzerland in 1883. He resided in Ouchy, where he stayed for some years. On 3 April 1884, Siri gave birth to their son, Hans.
In 1884 Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden. Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it. By the end of that year Strindberg was in a despondent mood: "My view now is," he wrote, "everything is shit. No way out. The skein is too tangled to be unravelled. It can only be sheared. The building is too solid to be pulled down. It can only be blown up." In May 1885 he wrote: "I am on my way to becoming an atheist." In the wake of the publication of Getting Married, he began to correspond with Émile Zola. During the summer he completed a sequel volume of stories, though some were quite different in tone from those of the first. Another collection of stories, Utopias in Reality, was published in September 1885, though it was not well received.
In 1885, they moved back to Paris. In September 1887 he began to write a novel in French about his relationship with Siri von Essen called The Defence of a Fool. In 1887, they moved to Issigatsbühl, near Lindau by Lake Constance. His next play, Comrades (1886), was his first in a contemporary setting. After the trial he evaluated his religious beliefs, and concluded that he needed to leave Lutheranism, though he had been Lutheran since childhood; and after briefly being a deist, he became an atheist. He needed a credo and he used Jean-Jacques Rousseau nature worshiping, which he had studied while a student, as one. His works The People of Hemsö (1887) and Among French Peasants (1889) were influenced by his study of Rousseau. He then moved to Germany, where he fell in love with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Prussia status of the officer corps. After that, he grew very critical of Rousseau and turned to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies, which emphasized the male intellect. Nietzsche's influence can be seen in The Defence of a Fool (1893), Pariah (1889), Creditors (1889), and By the Open Sea (1890).
Another change in his life after the trial is that Strindberg decided he wanted a scientific life instead of a literary one, and began to write about non-literary subjects. When he was 37, he began The Son of a Servant, a four-part autobiography. The first part ends in 1867, the year he left home for Uppsala. Part two describes his youth up to 1872. Part three, or The Red Room, describes his years as a poet and journalist; it ends with his meeting Siri von Essen. Part four, which dealt with the years from 1877 to 1886, was banned by his publishers and was not published until after his death. The three missing years, 1875–1877, were the time when Strindberg was wooing von Essen and their marriage; entitled He and She, this portion of his autobiography was not printed until 1919, after his death. It contains the love letters between the two during that period.
In the later half of the 1880s Strindberg discovered Naturalism. After completing The Father in a matter of weeks, he sent a copy to Émile Zola for his approval, though Zola's reaction was lukewarm. The drama revolves around the conflict between the Captain, a father, husband, and scientist, and his wife, Laura, over the education of their only child, a fourteen-year-old daughter named Berta. Through unscrupulous means, Laura gets the Captain to doubt his fatherhood until he suffers a mental and physical collapse. While writing The Father, Strindberg himself was experiencing marital problems and doubted the paternity of his children. He also suspected that Ibsen had based Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck (1884) on Strindberg because he felt that Ibsen viewed him as a weak and pathetic husband; he reworked the situation of Ibsen's play into a warfare between the two sexes. From November 1887 to April 1889, Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen. While there he had several opportunities to meet with both Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes. Georg helped him put on The Father, which had its première on 14 November 1887 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen. It enjoyed a successful run for eleven days after which it toured the Danish provinces.
Before writing Creditors, Strindberg completed one of his most famous pieces, Miss Julie. He wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Théâtre Libre, founded in 1887 by André Antoine. In the play he used Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and dramatized a doomed sexual encounter that crosses the division of social classes. It is believed that this play was inspired by the marriage of Strindberg, the son of a servant, to an aristocratic woman.
In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887), he referred to the psychological theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis. Strindberg developed a theory that sexual warfare was not motivated by carnal desire but by relentless human will. The winner was the one who had the strongest and most unscrupulous mind, someone who, like a hypnotist, could coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission. His view on psychological power struggles may be seen in works such as Creditors (1889), The Stronger (1889), and Pariah (1889).
In 1888, after a separation and reconciliation with Siri von Essen, he founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, where Siri became manager. He asked writers to send him scripts, which he received from Herman Bang, Gustav Wied and Nathalia Larsen. Less than a year later, with the theatre and reconciliation short lived, he moved back to Sweden while Siri moved back to her native Finland with the children. While there, he rode out the final phase of the divorce and later used this agonizing ordeal for the basis of The Bond and the Link (1893). Strindberg also became interested in short drama, called Quart d'heure. He was inspired by writers such as Gustave Guiche and Henri de Lavedan. His notable contribution was The Stronger (1889). As a result of the failure of the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, Strindberg did not work as a playwright for three years. In 1889, he published an essay entitled "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre", in which he disassociated himself from naturalism, arguing that it was petty and unimaginative realism. His sympathy for Nietzsche's philosophy and atheism in general was also on the wane. He entered the period of his "Inferno crisis," in which he had psychological and religious upheavals that influenced his later works.
August Strindberg's Inferno is his personal account of sinking deeper into some kind of madness, typified by visions and paranoia. In Strindberg och alkoholen (1985), James Spens discusses Strindberg's drinking habits, including his liking for absinthe and its possible implications for Strindberg's mental health during the inferno period.
1890s
After his disenchantment with naturalism, Strindberg had a growing interest in transcendental matters. Symbolism was just beginning at this time. Verner von Heidenstam and Ola Hanson had dismissed naturalism as "shoemaker realism" that rendered human experience in simplistic terms. This is believed to have stalled Strindberg's creativity, and Strindberg insisted that he was in a rivalry and forced to defend naturalism, even though he had exhausted its literary potential. These works include: Debit and Credit (1892), Facing Death (1892), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1893). His play The Keys of Heaven (1892) was inspired by the loss of his children in his divorce. He also completed one of his few comedies, Playing with Fire (1893), and the first two parts of his post-inferno trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904).
In 1892, he experienced writer's block, which led to a drastic reduction in his income. Depression followed as he was unable to meet his financial obligations and to support his children and former wife. A fund was set up through an appeal in a German magazine. This money allowed him to leave Sweden and he joined artistic circles in Berlin. Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne theatre premiered some of his famous works in Germany, including The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors.
Similar to twenty years earlier when he frequented The Red Room, he now went to the German tavern The Black Porker. Here he met a diverse group of artists from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany. His attention turned to Frida Uhl, who was twenty-three years younger than Strindberg. They were married in 1893. Less than a year later, their daughter Kerstin was born and the couple separated, though their marriage was not officially dissolved until 1897. Frida's family, in particular her mother, who was a devout Catholic, had an important influence on Strindberg, and in an 1894 letter he declared "I feel the hand of our Lord resting over me."
Some critics think that Strindberg suffered from severe paranoia in the mid-1890s, and perhaps that he temporarily experienced insanity. Others, including Evert Sprinchorn and Olof Lagercrantz, believed that he intentionally turned himself into his own guinea pig by doing psychological and drug-induced self-experimentation. He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898). Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith. In a postscript, he noted the impact of Emanuel Swedenborg on his current work.
"The Powers" were central to Strindberg's later work. He said that "the Powers" were an outside force that had caused him his physical and mental suffering because they were acting in retribution to humankind for their wrongdoings. As William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Honoré de Balzac, and William Butler Yeats had been, he was drawn to Swedenborg's mystical visions, with their depictions of spiritual landscape and Christian morality. Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense. He also felt that he was chosen by Providence to atone for the moral decay of others and that his tribulations were payback for misdeeds earlier in his life.
Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there. In 1899, he returned permanently to Stockholm, following a successful production there of Master Olof in 1897 (which was re-staged in 1899 to mark Strindberg's fiftieth birthday). He had the desire to become recognized as a leadíng figure in Swedish literature, and to put earlier controversies behind him, and felt that historical dramas were the way to attain that status. Though Strindberg claimed that he was writing "realistically," he freely altered past events and biographical information, and telescoped chronology (as often done in most historical fiction): more importantly, he felt a flow of resurgent inspiration, writing almost twenty new plays (many in a historical setting) between 1898 and 1902. His new works included the so-called Vasa Trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs (1899), Gustavus Vasa (1899), and Erik XIV (1899) and A Dream Play (written in 1901, first performed in 1907).
1900s
Strindberg was pivotal in the creation of chamber plays. Max Reinhardt was a big supporter of his, staging some of his plays at the Kleines Theatre in 1902 (including The Bond, The Stronger, and The Outlaw). Once Otto Brahm relinquished his role as head as of the Deutsches Theatre, Reinhardt took over and produced Strindberg's plays.
In 1903, Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded. He had completed short plays about Martin Luther, Plato, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Socrates. He wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday. He wrote The Last of the Knights (1908), Earl Birger of Bjalbo (1909), and The Regents (1909).
His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century, (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.
August Falck, an actor, wanted to put on a production of Miss Julie and wrote to Strindberg for permission. In September 1906 he staged the first Swedish production of Miss Julie. August Falck, played Jean and Manda Bjorling played Julie.
In 1909, Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman and first Swede to win the award. The leader of the Social Democrat Youth Alliance started a fund-raiser for a special "people's award". Nathan Söderblom (friend of Strindberg since the mid-90s years in Paris, a prominent theologian and later to become archbishop of Sweden) was noted as a donor, and both he and Strindberg came under attack from circles close to the conservative party and the church. In total 45,000 Swedish crowns were collected, by more than 20,000 donors, most of whom were workers. Albert Bonniers förlag, who had already published much of his work over the years, paid him 200,000 Swedish crowns for the publishing rights to his complete works; the first volumes of the edition would appear in print in 1912, a few months before his death. He invited his first three children (now, like their mother, living in Finland) to Stockholm and divided the money into five shares, one for each child, one for Siri (absent), and the last one for himself. In setting apart one share for Siri, Strindberg noted, in a shy voice, "This is for your mother - it's to settle an old debt". When the children returned to Helsinki, Siri was surprised to hear that she had been included, but accepted the money and told them in a voice that was, according to her daughter Karin, both proud and moved, "I shall accept it, receiving it as an old debt". The debt was less financial than mental and emotional; Strindberg knew he had sometimes treated her unfairly during the later years of their marriage and at their divorce trial. In 1912, she would pass away only a few weeks before him.
In 1907 Strindberg co-founded The Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, together with the young actor and stage director August Falck. His theatre was modeled after Max Reinhardt's Kammerspiel Haus. Strindberg and Falck had the intention of the theatre being used for his plays and his plays only, Strindberg also wanted to try out a more chamber-oriented and sparse style of dramatic writing and production. In time for the theatre's opening, Strindberg wrote four chamber plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The Ghost Sonata, and The Pelican; these were generally not a success with audiences or newspaper critics at the time but have been highly influential on modern drama (and soon would reach wider audiences at Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin and other German stages). Strindberg had very specific ideas about how the theatre would be opened and operated. He drafted a series of rules for his theatre in a letter to August Falck: 1. No liquor. 2. No Sunday performances. 3. Short performances without intermissions. 4. No calls. 5. Only 160 seats in the auditorium. 6. No prompter. No orchestra, only music on stage. 7. The text will be sold at the box office and in the lobby. 8. Summer performances. Falck helped to design the auditorium, which was decorated in a deep-green tone. The ceiling lighting was a yellow silk cover which created an effect of mild daylight. The floor was covered with a deep-green carpet, and the auditorium was decorated by six ultra modern columns with elaborate up-to-date capitals. Instead of the usual restaurant Strindberg offered a lounge for the ladies and a smoking-room for the gentlemen. The stage was unusually small, only 6 by 9 metres. The small stage and minimal number of seats was meant to give the audience a greater feeling of involvement in the work. Unlike most theatres at this time, the Intima Teater was not a place in which people could come to socialize. By setting up his rules and creating an intimate atmosphere, Strindberg was able to demand the audience's focus. When the theatre opened in 1907 with a performance of The Pelican it was a rather large hit. Strindberg used a minimal technique, as was his way, by only having a back drop and some sea shells on the stage for scene design and props. Strindberg was much more concerned with the actors portraying the written word than the stage looking pretty. The theatre ran into a financial difficulty in February 1908 and Falck had to borrow money from Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, who attended the première of The Pelican. The theatre eventually went bankrupt in 1910, but did not close until Strindberg's death in 1912. The newspapers wrote about the theatre until its death.
Death and funeral
Strindberg died shortly after the first staging of one of his plays in the United States — The Father opened on 9 April 1912 at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, in a translation by painter and playwright Edith Gardener Shearn Oland and her husband actor Warner Oland. They jointly published their translations of his plays in book form in 1912.
During Christmas 1911, Strindberg became sick with pneumonia and he never recovered completely. He also began to suffer more clearly from a stomach cancer (early signs of which had been felt in 1908). The final weeks of his life were painful. He had long since become a national celebrity, even if highly controversial, and when it became clear that he was seriously ill the daily papers in Stockholm began reporting on his health in every edition. He received many letters and telegrams from admirers across the country. He died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.
Strindberg was interred at Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm. He had given strict instructions concerning his funeral and how his body should be treated after death: only members of his immediate family were allowed to view his body, there would be no obduction, no photographs were taken, and no death mask was made. Strindberg had also requested that his funeral should take place as soon as possible after his death to avoid crowds of onlookers. However, the workers' organisations requested that the funeral should take place on a Sunday to make it possible for working men to pay their respects, and the funeral was postponed for five days, until Sunday, 19 May. According to Strindberg's last wish, the funeral procession was to start at 8am, again to avoid crowds, but large groups of people were nevertheless waiting outside his home as well as at the cemetery, as early as 7am. A short service was conducted by Nathan Söderblom by the bier in Strindberg's home, in the presence of three of Strindberg's children and his housekeeper, after which the coffin was taken outside for the funeral procession. The procession was followed by groups of students, workers, members of Parliament and a couple of cabinet ministers, and it was estimated that up to 60,000 people lined the streets. King Gustaf V sent a wreath for the bier.
Legacy
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists." Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said of Strindberg: "[he] was, for a time, my god, alongside Nietzsche".
A multi-faceted author, Strindberg was often extreme. His novel The Red Room (1879) made him famous. His early plays belong to the Naturalistic movement. His works from this time are often compared with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg's best-known play from this period is Miss Julie. Among his most widely read works is the novel The People of Hemsö.
Strindberg wanted to attain what he called "greater Naturalism." He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting. Strindberg felt that true naturalism was a psychological "battle of brains": two people who hate each other in the immediate moment and strive to drive the other to doom is the type of mental hostility that Strindberg strove to describe. He intended his plays to be impartial and objective, citing a desire to make literature akin to a science.
Following the inner turmoil that he experienced during the "Inferno crisis," he wrote an important book in French, Inferno (1896–7), in which he dramatised his experiences. He also exchanged a few cryptic letters with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Strindberg subsequently ended his association with Naturalism and began to produce works informed by Symbolism. He is considered one of the pioneers of the modern European stage and Expressionism. The Dance of Death, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata are well-known plays from this period.
His most famous and produced plays are Master Olof, Miss Julie, and The Father.
Internationally, Strindberg is chiefly remembered as a playwright, but in his native Sweden his name is associated no less with novels and other writings. Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles. He is often, though not universally, viewed as Sweden's greatest author, and taught in schools as a key figure of Swedish culture. The most important contemporary literary award in Sweden, Augustpriset, is named for Strindberg.
The Swedish composer Ture Rangström dedicated his first Symphony, which was finished in 1914, to August Strindberg in memoriam.
Politics
An acerbic polemicist who was often vehemently opposed to conventional authority, Strindberg was difficult to pigeon-hole as a political figure. Through his long career, he penned scathing attacks on the military, the church, and the monarchy. For most of his public life, he was seen as a major figure on the literary left and a standard-bearer of cultural radicalism, but, especially from the 1890s, he espoused conservative and religious views that alienated many former supporters. He resumed his attacks on conservative society with great vigor in the years immediately preceding his death.
Strindberg's opinions were typically stated with great force and vitriol, and sometimes humorously over-stated. He was involved in a variety of crises and feuds, skirmishing regularly with the literary and cultural establishment of his day, including erstwhile allies and friends. His youthful reputation as a genial enfant terrible of Swedish literature, transformed, eventually, into the role of a sort of ill-tempered towering giant of Swedish public life.
Strindberg was a prolific letter-writer, whose private communications have been collected in several annotated volumes. He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole. Many of his most controversial political statements are drawn from this private correspondence.
Influenced by the history of the 1871 Paris Commune, young Strindberg had embraced the view that politics is a conflict between the upper and lower classes. Early works like the Red Room or Master Olof took aim at public hypocrisy, royalty, and organized religion. He was, at this time, an outspoken socialist, mainly influenced by anarchist or libertarian socialist ideas. However, Strindberg's socialism was utopian and undogmatic, rooted less in economic or philosophic doctrine than in a fiery anti-establishment attitude, pitting "the people" against kings, priests, and merchants.
He read widely among socialist thinkers, including Cabet, Fourier, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Owen, whom he referred to as "friends of humanity and sharp thinkers." "Strindberg adopted ideas from everyone," writes Jan Olsson, who notes that Strindberg lived in a period where "terms like anarchism, socialism, and communism were alternately used as synonyms and as different terms."
By the early 1880s, many young political and literary radicals in Sweden had come to view Strindberg as a champion of their causes. However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of utopian, agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas. His views remained as fluid and eclectic as they were uncompromising, and on certain issues he could be wildly out of step with the younger generation of socialists. To Martin Kylhammar, the young Strindberg "was a 'reactionary radical' whose writing was populist and democratic but who persisted in an antiquated romanticizing of agrarian life."
Although he had been an early proponent of women's rights, calling for women's suffrage in 1884, Strindberg later became disenchanted with what he viewed as an unnatural equation of the sexes. In times of personal conflict and marital trouble (which was much of the time), he could lash out with crudely misogynistic statements. His troubled marriage with Siri von Essen, ended in an upsetting divorce in 1891, became the inspiration for The Defence of a Fool, begun in 1887 and published in 1893. Strindberg famously sought to insert a warning to lawmakers against "granting citizens' rights to half-apes, lower beings, sick children, [who are] sick and crazed thirteen times a year during their periods, completely insane while pregnant, and irresponsible throughout the rest of their lives." The paragraph was ultimately removed before printing by his publisher.
Strindberg's misogyny was at odds with the younger generation of socialist activists and has drawn attention in contemporary Strindberg scholarship. So was Strindberg's anti-Jewish rhetoric. Although particularly targeting Jewish enemies of his in Swedish cultural life, he also attacked Jews and Judaism as such. The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter ("Moses") in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews (including an unflattering portrayal of Albert Bonnier). Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg." Yet, as with many things, Strindberg's opinions and passions shifted with time. In the mid-1880s he toned down and then mostly ended his anti-Jewish rhetoric, after publicly declaring himself not to be an anti-Semite in 1884.
A self-declared atheist in his younger years, Strindberg would also re-embrace Christianity, without necessarily making his peace with the church. As noted by Stockholm's Strindberg Museum, the personal and spiritual crisis that Strindberg underwent in Paris in the 1890s, which prompted the writing of Inferno, had aesthetic as well as philosophical and political implications: "Before the Inferno crisis (1869 – 92), Strindberg was influenced by anarchism, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche; in the years after the crisis (1897 – 1911) he was influenced by Swedenborg, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Beethoven."
In Inferno, Strindberg notes his ideological and spiritual evolution:
What is the purpose of having toiled through thirty years only to gain, through experience, that which I had already understood as a concept? In my youth, I was a sincere believer, and you [i.e. the powers that be] have made me a free-thinker. Out of a free-thinker you have made me an atheist; out of an atheist, a religious believer. Inspired by humanitarian ideas, I have praised socialism. Five years later, you have proven to me the unreasonableness of socialism. Everything that once enthralled me you have invalidated! And presuming that I will now abandon myself to religion, I am certain that you will, in ten years, disprove religion. (Strindberg, Inferno, Chapter XV.)
Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer. However, several former admirers were disappointed and troubled by what they viewed as Strindberg's descent into religious conservatism and, perhaps, madness. His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism. In 1909, Branting remarked on Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:
To the young Strindberg, the trail-blazer, the rouser from sleep, let us offer all our praise and admiration. To the writer in a more mature age [let us offer] a place of rank on the Aeropagus of European erudition. But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self. (Hjalmar Branting, in Social-Demokraten, 22 January 1909.)
Toward the end of his life, however, Strindberg would dramatically reassert his role as a radical standard-bearer and return to the good graces of progressive Swedish opinion.
In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer"). The ensuing debate, known as "Strindbergsfejden" or "The Strindberg Feud", is one of the most significant literary debates in Swedish history. It came to comprise about a thousand articles by various authors across some eighty newspapers, raging for two years until Strindberg's death in 1912. The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics. In 1912, Strindberg's funeral was co-organized by Branting and heavily attended by members of the Swedish labor movement, with "more than 100 red banners" in attendance alongside the entire Social Democrat parliamentary contingent.
Strindberg's daughter Karin Strindberg married a Russian Bolshevik of partially Swedish ancestry, ("Paulsson").
Painting
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist.
Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Photography
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted;
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific.
In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society.
Occult studies
Alchemy, occultism, Swedenborgianism, and various other eccentric interests were pursued by Strindberg with some intensity for periods of his life.
In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter. Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel. It remains unclear to what extent the book represents a genuine attempt at autobiography or exaggerates for literary effect. Olof Lagercrantz has suggested that Strindberg staged and imagined elements of the crisis as material for his literary production.
Personal life
Strindberg was married three times, as follows:
Siri von Essen: married 1877–1891 (14 years), 3 daughters (Karin Smirnov, Greta, and another who died in infancy), 1 son (Hans);
Frida Uhl: married 1893–1895, (2 years) 1 daughter (Kerstin); and
Harriet Bosse: married 1901–1904 (3 years), 1 daughter (Anne-Marie).
Strindberg was age 28 and Siri was 27 at the time of their marriage. He was 44 and Frida was 21 when they married, and he was 52 and Harriet was 23 when they married. Late during his life he met the young actress and painter Fanny Falkner (1890–1963) who was 41 years younger than Strindberg. She wrote a book which illuminates his last years, but the exact nature of their relationship is debated. He had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.
He was related to Nils Strindberg (a son of one of August's cousins).
Strindberg's relationships with women were troubled and have often been interpreted as misogynistic by contemporaries and modern readers. Marriage and families were being stressed in Strindberg's lifetime as Sweden industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Problems of prostitution and poverty were debated among writers, critics and politicians. His early writing often dealt with the traditional roles of the sexes imposed by society, which he criticized as unjust.
Strindberg's last home was Blå tornet in central Stockholm, where he lived from 1908 until 1912. It is now a museum. Of several statues and busts of him erected in Stockholm, the most prominent is Carl Eldh's, erected in 1942 in Tegnérlunden, a park adjoining this house.
Bibliography
La cruauté et le théâtre de Strindberg de Pascale Roger, coll "Univers théâtral", L'Harmattan, Paris, 2004, 278 p.
The Growth of a Soul (1914)
The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories (1915)
There Are Crimes and Crimes
Further reading
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (cloth) (bpk)
Brita M. E. Mortensen, Brian W. Downs, Strindberg: An Introduction to His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965
Gundlach, Angelika; Scherzer, Jörg (Ed.): Der andere Strindberg – Materialien zu Malerei, Photographie und Theaterpraxis, Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1981. ISBN 3-458-31929-8
Prideaux, Sue, Strindberg: A Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Schroeder, J., Stenport, A., and Szalczer, E., editors, August Strindberg and Visual Culture, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sprinchorn, Evert, Strindberg As Dramatist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Stamper, Judith (1975), review of the production of To Damascus at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in April 1975, in Calgacus 2, Summer 1975, p. 56,
Sources
Adams, Ann-Charlotte Gavel, ed. 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 259 Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers Before World War II. Detroit, MI: Gale. .
Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. .
Ekman, Hans-Göran. 2000. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg's Chamber Plays. London and New Brunswick, New Jersey: Athlone. .
Gunnarsson, Torsten. 1998. Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP. .
Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. .
Lagercrantz, Olof. 1984. August Strindberg. Trans. Anselm Hollo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. .
Lane, Harry. 1998. "Strindberg, August." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Ed. Martin Banham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1040–41. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ward, John. 1980. The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg. London: Athlone. .
.
.
.
References
External links
English-language translations in the public domain
Public domain translations of Strindberg's drama
The Father, Countess Julie, The Outlaw, The Stronger
Comrades, Facing Death, Pariah, Easter
Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm
There are Crimes and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, and Pariah
To Damascus Part 1
Road To Damascus Parts 1, 2, and 3
Public domain translations of Strindberg's novels
The Red Room.
The Confession of a Fool.
Other
Photographs by Strindberg from the National Library of Sweden on Flickr
.
.
.
.
August Strindberg and absinthe; in his life and in his works
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A Dream Play (manuscript) at World Digital Library
Burkhart Brückner: Biography of Johan August Strindberg in: Biographical Archive of Psychiatry (BIAPSY).
1849 births
1912 deaths
19th-century alchemists
19th-century essayists
19th-century letter writers
19th-century male artists
19th-century memoirists
19th-century non-fiction writers
19th-century occultists
19th-century short story writers
19th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Swedish novelists
19th-century Swedish painters
19th-century Swedish photographers
19th-century Swedish poets
19th-century Swedish writers
20th-century alchemists
20th-century essayists
20th-century letter writers
20th-century male artists
20th-century memoirists
20th-century occultists
20th-century short story writers
20th-century Swedish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Swedish male writers
20th-century Swedish non-fiction writers
20th-century Swedish novelists
20th-century Swedish painters
20th-century Swedish photographers
20th-century Swedish poets
Anti-militarism in Europe
Anti-monarchists
Anti-poverty advocates
Artists from Stockholm
Burials at Norra begravningsplatsen
Critics of Marxism
Critics of political economy
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Deaths from cancer in Sweden
European writers in French
Expressionist dramatists and playwrights
Expressionist painters
Irony theorists
Literacy and society theorists
Literary theorists
Male dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
Modernist writers
People prosecuted for blasphemy
Psychological fiction writers
Social commentators
Social critics
Surrealist writers
Swedish alchemists
Swedish anti-capitalists
Swedish art critics
Swedish autobiographers
Swedish essayists
Swedish humorists
Swedish-language writers
Swedish literary critics
Swedish male non-fiction writers
Swedish male novelists
Swedish male painters
Swedish male poets
Swedish memoirists
Swedish occultists
Swedish republicans
Swedish satirists
Swedish short story writers
Swedish socialists
Swedish theatre critics
Swedish theatre directors
Theorists on Western civilization
Uppsala University alumni
Writers about activism and social change
Writers from Stockholm
| false |
[
"Hidden Children is a term for the (mainly Jewish) children who, during the Holocaust, were hidden in various different ways, in order to save them from the Nazis. Most were in Poland, though some were also in Western Europe. Not all attempts to save them were successful; for instance, Anne Frank was eventually captured.\n\nMethods of hiding\n\nMost Hidden Children were in Poland, though some were also in Holland and France, with some in other parts of Western Europe.\n\nChildren were hidden in several different ways, each way being traumatic, but those where the child was separated from his or her parents even more traumatic (and see next section).\n\n1. A child who was actually hidden with at least one of his parents, in some physical location, such as a secret attic. The family would need at least one outside non-Jewish \"helper,\" who brought daily food and other supplies. The lives of the helpers were in extreme danger if the Nazis were to find out this deception, since then they themselves would all be murdered.\n\n2. A child who was \"hidden\" in a convent, as-if one of the other regular Catholic children. The child would have to be able to behave as all the other Catholic convent children behaved - know his prayers, know how to handle a rosary, know how to behave during mass, etc. All these skills the child would have to learn very fast. In this case, at least one of the nuns, and generally more, would have to know that the child was actually Jewish and \"hiding.\" Once again, the lives of the nuns were in extreme danger if the Nazis were to find out this deception.\n\n3. A child who, during the Holocaust, was placed into the care of a \"foster-family,\" usually Catholic, and raised as if one of the family. To explain the sudden \"arrival\" of this \"new\" child into the family, he might for instance be described as a cousin who had come to join this family, perhaps from the countryside. Since he was now a new member of this Catholic family, he too would have to be able to behave as other Catholic children behaved - know his prayers, know how to handle a rosary, know how to behave during mass, etc. Once again, the lives of the true family-members were in extreme danger if the Nazis were to find out this deception.\n\nSome such \"foster-family\" children were only babies at the time they were \"placed\" with a foster-family, others only toddlers or else still very young.\n\nThe experience of these \"foster family\" Hidden Children is very similar to that of the One Thousand Children.\n\n4. A child \"hidden\" by the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) as part of their activities in France. (During the war, OSE was unable to continue its earlier work in Poland and elsewhere.)\n\nIn each of these cases, there had to be at least one non-Jewish, probably Catholic, helper on the outside, who risked his or her own life to help. Whenever there are any records about such a person, that person is designated and honored as a Righteous Gentile.\n\nTrauma\nHidden Children faced significant trauma during and after World War II.\n\nMost importantly, except when the child was in hiding with at least one parent, the Hidden Child had \"lost\" his parents and his parental support during the war. Instead he went into the care, good or bad, of strangers.\n\nYounger Hidden Children were often too young to remember their parents. Older Hidden Children knew that if they were discovered by the Nazis their fate was dire.\n\nAfter the war, as with nearly all Child Survivors of the Holocaust, the Hidden Child never regained his parents, who nearly surely had been murdered by the Nazis. Usually some difficult delay, generally he would be truly adopted by a caring new family - but the trauma just mentioned would remain with him.\n\nA notable source-book on Hidden Children is a book of excerpts of writings by Hidden Children themselves \"Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust.\"\n\nRecognition and restitution by German Government\nIn 2014, the German Government, through the Claims Conference, officially arranged to make an extra restitution payment of 2,500 Euros to each such Hidden Child, in addition to any other Restitution for Holocaust experiences to which they were entitled. This was in recognition that any physical or emotional trauma suffered by a child would be greater than that suffered by an adult in similar circumstances, because the child would not yet have developed fully mature coping skills. Due to budgetary constraints, the amount of the payment (about $3,300 at the time) is only a small token, but with high symbolic value.\n\nDocumentary\n\nA 2002 documentary, Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII, covered the Hidden Children.\n\nReferences\n\nChildren in the Holocaust",
"The Swabian children (German: Schwabenkinder) were peasant children from poor families in the Alps of Austria and Switzerland who went to find work on farms in Upper Swabia and the Swabian Jura. Usually they were sent by their parents to become seasonal workers. They were taken in spring and brought to the child markets in Germany, mainly in Upper Swabia, where they would be purchased or \"rented\" by farmers for the season. This use of children as workers was most widespread in the 19th century.\n\nThe march over the Alps to Germany proved often difficult and exhausting. Usually their guide was a priest, who was also responsible for ensuring the children had a warm stable to sleep in.\n\nThe marches were large, organised groups of several thousand children, taken over the snow-covered mountains often still dressed in rags. It was not uncommon for five and six-year-old children to be taken.\n\nThe American press began a campaign in 1908 exposing the Swabian children, describing the child market in Friedrichshafen as a \"barely concealed slave market\".\n\nThe child markets were abolished in 1915, yet the trade of children did not end completely until compulsory schooling for foreign children was introduced in Württemberg in 1921.\n\nMany immigration certificates from Swabia show surnames typical of Tyrol and other regions the children were taken from (e.g. Braxmeier from Braxmarer).\n\nFilm\n\n Schwabenkinder, TV film (first aired 2003), director: Jo Baier, actors: Tobias Moretti, Vadim Glowna\n\nThe movie is based on the novel \"Die Schwabenkinder - Die Geschichte des Kaspanaze\" (\"The Swabian Children - The Story of Kaspanaze\") by Elmar Bereuter ().\n\nFilm synopsis: After his mother is killed in an avalanche, the farmer boy Kaspar is sent by his struggling father to work in Swabia. Together with other children from the village, their guide (Tobias Moretti) brings the group to the child market at Ravensburg. There the miraculous story begins: The brutal treatment of the boy by the farmer, his escape, emigration to the United States, and final home coming to his village many years later to visit his dying father.\n\nMigrant workers\nChild labour\nObsolete occupations\nHistory of Swabia\nUpper Swabia"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth"
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
Where was he born
| 1 |
Where was David McCullough born
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"Miguel Skrobot (Warsaw, 1873 – Curitiba, February 20, 1912) was a businessman Brazilian of Polish origin.\n\nMiguel Skrobot was born in 1873, in Warsaw, Poland, to José Skrobot and Rosa Skrobot. When he was 18 he migrated to Brazil and settled in Curitiba as a merchant.\n\nHe married Maria Pansardi, who was born in Tibagi, Paraná, to Italian immigrants, and she bore him three children. He kept a steam-powered factory where he worked on grinding and toasting coffee beans under the \"Rio Branco\" brand, located on the spot where today stands the square called Praça Zacarias (square located in the center of Curitiba). He also owned a grocery store near Praça Tiradentes (also a square in the center of Curitiba, where the city was born). He died an early death, when he was 39, on February 20, 1912.\n\nReferences\n\n1873 births\n1912 deaths\nBrazilian businesspeople\nPeople from Curitiba\nPolish emigrants to Brazil",
"Adolf von Rauch (22 April 1798 - 12 December 1882) was a German paper manufacturer in Heilbronn, where he was born and died and where he was a major builder of social housing.\n\nPapermakers\n1798 births\n1882 deaths\nPeople from Heilbronn"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,"
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
What did they try next
| 2 |
What did David McCullough try next
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| false |
[
"Compliance gaining is a term used in the social sciences that encompasses the intentional act of altering another's behavior. Research in this area originated in the field of social psychology, but communication scholars have also provided ample research in compliance gaining. While persuasion focuses on attitudes and beliefs, compliance gaining focuses on behavior.\n\nOverview\nCompliance gaining occurs whenever a person intentionally induces another person to do something that they might have not done otherwise. Compliance gaining and persuasion are related; however, they are not one and the same. Changes in attitudes and beliefs are often the goal in persuasion; compliance gaining seeks to change the behavior of a target. It is not necessary to change a person's attitude or beliefs to gain compliance. For instance, an automobile driver might have positive attitudes towards driving fast. The threat of a speeding ticket from a police officer positioned in a speed trap may gain compliance from the driver. Conversely, persuading someone to change their attitude or belief will not necessarily gain compliance. A doctor might tell a patient that tobacco use poses a serious threat to a smoker's health. The patient may accept this as a fact and view smoking negatively, but might also continue to use tobacco.\n\nDevelopments\nCompliance gaining research has its roots in social psychology, but overlaps with many other disciplines such as communication and sociology. Compliance gaining can occur via mediated channels, but the research is most associated with interpersonal communication. In 1967, sociologists Marwell and Schmitt attempted to explain how people select compliance gaining messages. The researchers posited that people have a mental bank of strategies that they draw from when selecting a message. Marwell and Schmitt created a typology for compliance gaining techniques: promise, threat, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking, pregiving, aversive stimulation, debt, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altertcasting, altruism, positive esteem, and negative esteem. This study was the catalyst for more interest in compliance gaining from communication scholars.\n\nMiller, Boster, Roloff, and Seibold (1977) as well as Cody and McLaughlin (1980) studied the situational variables that influences compliance gaining strategies. The latter study identified six different typologies of situations that can influence compliance gaining behaviors: personal benefits (how much personal gain an actor can yield from the influencing behavior), dominance (the power relation between the actor and the target), rights (whether the actor has the right to expect compliance), resistance (how easy will the target be influenced), intimacy (whether the relation between actor and target is shallow), and consequences (what sort of effect this situation would have on the relationship between actor and target). Dillard and Burgoon (1985) later investigated the Cody-McLaughlin typologies. They concluded that situational variables, as described by Cody and McLaughlin, did very little to predict compliance gaining strategy selection. As early as 1982, there was already strong criticism about the strength of the relationships between situational variables and compliance gaining message selection.\n\nBy the 1990s, many research efforts attempting to link compliance gaining strategy selection and features of a situation or features of the individual \"failed to coalesce into a coherent body of knowledge\". Situational dimensions and individual differences were not effective in predicting so researchers went into other perspectives in an effort to understand compliance gaining. For instance, Schrader and Dillard (1998) linked primary and secondary goals to compliance gaining strategy. Using the theoretical framework of Goals-Plans-Actions developed by Dillard in 1980, Schrader and Dillard operate from the assumption that individuals possess and act on multiple goals. In any compliance seeking situation, the actor has primary goals that drive the attempt to influence a target. The primary goal is what the interaction is all about. For instance, if an actor wants a target to stop smoking, this is the primary goal and this is what drives the interaction. However, in the course of pursuing that goal, there are \"secondary\" goals to consider. These are goals that limit the behavior of the actor. If getting a target to stop smoking is the primary goal, then a secondary goal might be to maintain a friendly relationship with the target. Dillard specifies five types of secondary goals that temper the compliance gaining behavior: identity goals (morals and personal standards), interaction goals (impression management), relational resource goals (relationship management), personal resource goals (material concerns of the actor), and arousal management goals (efforts to manage anxiety about the compliance gaining attempt).\n\nDespite the charges of individual differences making very little progress in prediction compliance gaining strategies, some researchers in the 2000s have focused their efforts to rectify this weakness in the research to link individual differences with compliance gaining effectiveness. King (2001), acknowledging the paucity of robust situational and trait studies linked to compliance gaining, attempted to isolate one situation as a predictor for compliance gaining message selection. King's research suggested that when target of compliance gaining were perceived to be less resistant to influence attempts, the actors used more compliance gaining tactics. When targets were perceived as strongly resistant, the actors used less tactics. Elias and Loomis (2004) found that gender and race affect an instructor's ability to gain compliance in a college classroom. Punyanunt (2000) found that using humor may enhance the effectiveness of pro-social compliance gaining techniques in the classroom. Remland and Jones (1994) found that vocal intensity and touch also affect compliance gaining. Goei et al. (2003) posited that \"feelings of liking\" between target and actor as well as doing favors for the target lead to liking and obligation, which leads to increased compliance. Pre-giving (giving a target a small gift or favor such as a free sample of food) is positively associated with increased compliance in strangers. \nOne of the major criticisms of examining compliance gaining literature is that very little research studies actual compliance. Filling out a survey and reporting intent to comply with a request is certainly different than actually completing the request. For example, many people might report that they will comply with a doctor's order, but away from the doctor's office, they may ignore medical advice.\n\nApplication\nCompliance gaining research has a fairly diverse background so much of the research uses alternate paradigms and perspectives. As mentioned above, the field of compliance gaining originated in social psychology, but was adopted by many communication scholars as well. Many fields from consumer psychology to primary education pedagogy have taken great interest in compliance gaining.\n\nMedicine \nDoctors have expressed much frustration with compliance resistance from their patients. A reported 50% of patients do not comply with medical advice and prescriptions. Researchers, as well as medical professionals, have a vested interest in learning strategies that can increase compliance in their patients. Many severe and chronic conditions can be avoided if early treatments are followed as prescribed, avoiding death, permanent injury, and costlier medical treatments later on. Researchers in communication have reported some key findings such as: clear and effective communication about a patient's condition or illness increases the likelihood of patient compliance with medical advice; doctors that use humor in their communication with patients have higher satisfaction rates; high satisfaction rates with physicians is highly correlated with patient compliance.\n\nPedagogy \nFor teachers, gaining compliance from students is a must for effective teaching. Studies in compliance gaining have ranged from elementary education all the way to adult and higher education.\n\nSales and consumer psychology \nAdvertising and marketing are tools of persuasion. There is literally centuries' worth of literature available about persuasion. However, changing attitudes and beliefs about a product does not necessarily change behaviors. Purchasing a product is a behavior. Researchers such as Parrish-Sprowl, Carveth, & Senk (1994) have applied compliance gaining research to effective sales.\n\nCompliance\nCompliance gaining was not originally conceived in the field of communication but found its roots in the late 1960s as a result of studies and research by two sociologists, Gerald Marwell and David Schmitt. In 1967, Marwell and Schmitt produced some interesting compliance-gaining tactics concerning the act of getting a teenager to study. The tactics, sixteen in all, are as follows.\n\n Promise: If you comply, I will reward you. For example, you offer to increase Dick's allowance if he studies more.\n Threat: If you do not comply, I will punish you. For example, you threaten to forbid Dick to use the car if he doesn't start studying more.\n Expertise (positive): If you comply, you will be rewarded because of the \"nature of things.\" For example, you tell Dick that if he gets good grades he be able to get into college and get a good job.\n Expertise (negative): If you do not comply, you will be punished because of the \"nature of things.\" For example, you tell Dick that if he does not get good grades he will not be able to get into college or get a good job.\n Liking: Act friendly and helpful to get the person in a \"good frame of mind\" so they comply with the request. For example, you try to be as friendly and pleasant as possible to put Dick in a good mood before asking him to study.\n Pre-giving: Reward the person before requesting compliance. For example, raise Dick's allowance and tell him you now expect him to study.\n Aversive stimulation: Continuously punish the person, making cessation contingent on compliance. For example, you tell Dick he may not use the car until he studies more.\n Debt: You owe me compliance because of past favors. For example, you point out that you have sacrificed and saved to pay for Dick's education and that he owes it to you to get good enough grades to get into a good college.\n Moral appeal: You are immoral if you do not comply. You tell Dick that it is morally wrong for anyone not to get as good grades as possible and that he should study more.\n Self-feeling (positive): You will feel better about yourself if you comply. For example, you tell Dick that he will feel proud if he gets himself to study more.\n Self-feeling (negative): You will feel worse about yourself if you do not comply. For example, you tell Dick that he will feel ashamed of himself if he gets bad grades.\n Altercasting (positive): A person with \"good\" qualities would comply. For example, you tell Dick that because he is a mature and intelligent person he naturally will want to study more and get good grades.\n Altercasting (negative): Only a person with \"bad\" qualities would not comply. For example, you tell Dick that he should study because only someone very childish does not study.\n Altruism: I need your compliance very badly, so do it for me. For example, you tell Dick that you really want very badly for him to get into a good college and that you wish he would study more as a personal favor to you.\n Esteem (positive): People you value will think better of you if you comply. For example, you tell Dick that the whole family will be very proud of him if he gets good grades.\n Esteem (negative): People you value will think the worse of you if you do not comply. For example, you tell Dick that the whole family will be very disappointed in him if he gets poor grades.\n\nIn 1967, Marwell and Schmitt conducted experimental research, using the sixteen compliance gaining tactics and identified five basic compliance-gaining strategies: Rewarding activity, Punishing activity, Expertise, Activation of impersonal commitments, and Activation of personal commitments.\n\nPower\nAnother element of compliance-gaining was produced in the early 1960s, as French and Raven were researching the concepts of power, legitimacy, and politeness. They identified five influential aspects associated with power, which help illustrate elements of the study of compliance. The fives bases of power are as follows:\n\n Reward Power: A person with reward power has control over some valued resource (e.g., promotions and raises).\n Coercive Power: A person with coercive power has the ability to inflict punishments (e.g., fire you).\n Expert Power: Expert power is based on what a person knows (e.g., you may do what a doctor tells you to do because they know more about medicine than you do).\n Legitimate Power: Legitimate power is based on formal rank or position (e.g., you obey someone's commands because they are the vice president in the company for which you work).\n Referent Power: People have referent power when the person they are trying to influence wants to be like them (e.g., a mentor often has this type of power).\n\n(French & Raven, 1960)\n\nTechniques\nThe study of compliance gaining has been central in the development of many commonly used or heard of techniques. The following techniques are a few of what has evolved as a product of the study of compliance gaining strategies. Note, many of these techniques have been empirically documented increasing compliance.\n\nFoot-in-the-door (FITD) \n\nWith research starting in 1966 by Freedman & Fraser, foot-in-the door is one of the earliest and most researched compliance gaining techniques. This technique gains compliance by making a smaller easy request then a larger more difficult request at a later time. The smaller request is usually one that would be widely accepted without scrutiny. The larger request is usually the actual the task or goal wanted to be completed.\n\nEffectivity \nFreedman and Fraser thought that after satisfying the smaller initial request, if the person was not forced to do then they must be \"the type of person who fulfills such requests\".\n\nThe smaller task/request should relate to the larger request and not be trivial. For the foot-in-the-door technique to be successful it must generate the self-aware \"I am the kind of person who fulfills this type of request\" other wise known as the self-perception theory. Other studies found that if the initial request is easy but unusual or bizarre, it would also generate the foot-in-the-door effectiveness. This idea was developed further into the Disrupt-Then-Reframe technique.\n\nThere are other reasons besides the self-perception theory that makes the foot-in-the-door technique successful.\n\nConsistency – Cialdini and Guadagno, Asher, and Demaine believe that what makes people want to fulfill larger request is the need to be consistent.\n\nThe Norm to Help Others – Harris believed that after the first request, the norm to help others becomes clear. It only becomes evident after the person reviews his or her reason why they completed the original request.\n\nSatisfying the First Request – Crano and Sivacek thought what made the technique so effective was personal satisfaction. \"The person learns that the fulfillment of request brings the reward of a positive experience. One may assume that the likelihood that satisfaction of this type appears willi increase if the person has to react to something unusual that awakens his or her mindfulness, and will decrease in situations in which the person reacts automatically and habitually\".\n\nDoor-in-the-face (DITF) \n\nDoor-in-the-face was first introduced in 1975 by Cialdini and colleagues. The opposite of foot-in-the-door, in the door-in-the-face technique, the requestor asks a large objectionable request which is denied by the target instead of gaining compliance by asking a smaller easy request. The requestor seeking compliance ask a smaller more reasonable request.\n\nThere are several theories that explain why door-in-the-face is an effective gaining compliance technique.\n\nSelf-presentation theory – \"that individuals will comply with a second request due to fears one will be perceived negatively by rejecting successive prosocial request for compliance\".\n\nReciprocal concessions – this theory describes the effects of door-in-the-face as a \"process of mutual concessions\". \"The second request represents a concession on the part of the sender (from his or her initial request), and compliance to the second request represents a concession on the part of the receiver (from his or her inclination to not comply with the first request)\".\n\nGuilt – One reason that makes door-in-the-face such an effective technique is people feel guilty for refusing to comply with a request twice.\n\nSocial Responsibility – this theory describes the social repercussions and pressures that occur if an individual declines a request.\n\nAll together the theories propose that a target who declines the first request feel a \"personal or social responsibility\" to comply with the second request. In an effort to avoid feeling guilty or reduce the sense of obligation the target would have.\n\nRecent techniques\n\nDisrupt-then-reframe (DTR) \nDTR was first introduced by Barbara Price Davis and Eric S. Knowles in 1999. This technique states that a person will be more likely to comply with a request if the initial request or pitch is confusing. The pitch is immediately followed by a reframing or a reason to comply with the request.\n\nAn example of this technique is: A waiter states that \"the steak dinner is on special for 800 pennies; it's a really good deal\". Disrupting the couple by saying \"800 pennies\" instead of \"8 dollars\", the waiter is able to increase the likelihood that they will buy the steak dinner.\n\nDTR was found to be a very effective way to gain compliance in non-profit instances such as raising money for charities or asking people to take a survey. DTR was found to be less successful as a sales technique; this may be because the message is more scrutinized, making it harder to confuse the target.\n\nPersistence \nPersistence used as a compliance gaining technique, gets the target to comply by repeating the message. In 1979, Cacioppo and Petty found that repeating the message more than five times lead to decrease in compliance. Success is enhanced if the repetition comes from more than one person and is enhanced further if the message has the same idea or meaning but is not exact.\n\nAn example of this technique would be: \"My wife kept reminding me to take out the trash until I finally did it.\"\n\nDump and chase (DAC) \nPersistence has a high probability of annoying the target and creating a negative interaction which could be viewed as \"nagging\". A way to avoid this would be rejecting the targets objection to your request by asking \"why not?\", then forming another message to overcome the second objection to gain compliance. This technique is called dump and chase.\n\nMechanics of this technique are urgency and guilt. When the repeated message is presented to the target it may be perceived as urgent, thus making it seem more important, and more willing to comply. By creating a sense of obligation in the request, the target may develop guilt if not willing to comply.\n\nJust-One-More (JOM) \nJust-One-More was developed as a way to make a donation seem more important. The use of this technique involves using the language of \"Just-One-More\" to gain compliance. The technique is found to be most useful in instances regarding volunteering and donations. It is seen as \"the last person to help will be more rewarding than being one of the first or those in the middle, due to the expectation that the requestor will appreciate the last person more than any of those who complied previously\".\nFor Example: \"Do you want to buy this car? I need just one more sale to reach my quota this month.\"\n\nIf the target finds that the requestor is lying or being deceptive about being the last one, it will create a negative outlook on the person and the organization that he or she represents. Even though losing some of the effectiveness the requestor could state that they are \"close to their goal\" or \"almost there\".\n\n64 compliance gaining strategies \nIn \"Classifying Compliance Gaining Messages: Taxonomic Disorder and Strategic Confusion\", Kathy Kellermann and Tim Cole put together 64 compliance gaining strategies as an attempt to classify more than 820 previous strategies.\n Actor Takes Responsibility: Try to get others to comply by stating your willingness to help them or even work on the request yourself. That is, try to gain their compliance by offering to do it yourself as a means of getting them to do what you want. Example: \"Is there anything I can do to so you can finish the project on time?\"\n Altercasting (Negative): Try to get others to comply by pointing out that only a bad person would not do what is wanted. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that only a person with negative qualities wouldn't comply. Example: \"You should stop watching these types of television shows as only a disturbed person would like them.\" \n Altercasting (Positive): Try to get others to comply by pointing out that a good person would do what is wanted. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that any person with positive qualities would comply. Example: \"A good boy would eat all his vegetables.\"\n Altruism: Try to get others to comply by asking them to give you a hand out of the goodness of their heart. That is, try to gain their compliance by asking them to be altruistic and just do it for you. Example: \"Could you help me move, I would really appreciate it.\"\n Assertion: Try to get others to comply by asserting (forcefully stating) what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by demanding (commanding) them to comply. Example: \"Go get a bandaid now!\"\n Audience-Use: Try to get others to comply by having a group of other people present when you make your request. That is, try to gain their compliance by asking them in front of other people as a way to back up your request. Example: \"I asked her to go to the prom with me in front of her friends.\" \n Authority Appeal: Try to get others to comply on the basis of the authority that you or other people have. That is, try to gain their compliance by using or relying on a position of power over them to get them do to what you want. Example: \"My boss told me to get him the reports by 10 am so I did.\"\n Aversive Stimulation: Try to get others to comply by doing things they don't like until they agree to comply. That is, try to gain their compliance by bothering them until they do what you want. Example: \"My co-worker kept bothering me to quit smoking until I finally did.\"\n Bargaining: Try to get others to comply by striking a bargain with them. That is, try to gain their compliance by negotiating a deal where you each do something for the other so everyone gets what they want. Example: \"If you help me with the dishes, I will help you with the laundry.\"\n Benefit (Other): Try to get others to comply by telling them people other than themselves would benefit if they do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out how it helps people other than themselves if they comply. Example: \"By donating to our fundraiser, You ensure that everyone will have a coat this winter.\"\nBenefit (Self): Try to get others to comply by telling them you personally would benefit if they do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out how it helps oneself if they comply. Example: \"If you helped me with the yard work, then I won't get a ticket by the city tomorrow.\"\nBenefit (Target): Try to get others to comply by telling them they personally would benefit if they do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out how it helps them if they comply. Example: \"If you go grocery shopping for me tonight then you will have something for lunch tomorrow.\"\nChallenge: Try to get others to comply by challenging them to do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by provoking, stimulating, tempting, goading, and/or galvanizing them to comply. Example: I didn't want to race until his car pulled beside mine and he revved the engine. \nCompliment: Try to get others to comply by complimenting them on their abilities or accomplishments. That is, try to gain their compliance by praising them to get them to do what you want. Example: With that jump shot, you would be really good at basketball. \nCompromise: Try to get others to comply by offering to compromise with them. That is, try to gain their compliance by making a concession to them so they'll make their concession to you and do what you want. Example: \"I will drop you off at the airport if you will go to the dentist with me.\"\n Cooperation: Try to get others to comply by being cooperative and collaborating with them. That is, try to gain their compliance not by telling the other person what to do but by offering to discuss things and work them out together. Example: \"We should get the team together and brainstorm new ideas for this problem.\"\nCriticize: Try to get others to comply by criticizing them. That is, try to gain their compliance by attacking them on a personal level to get them to do what you want. Example: \"It looks like you're really gaining some weight, why don't you go on a run with me.\"\nDebasement: Try to get others to comply by acting pitiful and pleading. That is, try to gain their compliance by debasing, demeaning, degrading, devaluing, humiliating, and/or lowering yourself so as to deprive yourself of esteem or self-worth to get them to do what you want. Example: \"I am so stupid, I can't believe I deleted the report. Can you please go delay the presentation.\" \nDebt: Try to get others to comply by reminding them they are in debt to you because of things you have done for them in the past. That is, try to gain their compliance by indicating that they owe it to you to do what you want. Example: \"You should paid for my lunch, I bought your lunch last time.\"\nDeceit: Try to get others to comply by misleading them. That is, try to gain their compliance by lying to or deceiving them. Example: \"We told them the car was in perfect working order, but the transmission is about to go out.\"\nDirect Request: Try to get others to comply by just making a direct request. That is, try to gain their compliance by simply asking or stating what you want without giving any reasons for them to comply. Example: \"Can I use the computer?\"\nDisclaimer (Norms/Rules): Try to get others to comply by downplaying or disavowing restrictions and constraints that might prevent them from doing what you want them to do. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that otherwise applicable procedures, rules, norms, and/or expectations should be broken in this instance. Example: \"You should drive faster than the speed limit, this is an emergency!\"\nDisclaimer (Other): Try to get others to comply by downplaying or disavowing the ability of anyone else to do so. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that other people can't help you or do what is needed. Example: \"I would ask Ted for his help but we know that he is not good at presentations.\"\nDisclaimer (Self): Try to get others to comply by downplaying or disavowing your reasons for asking. That is, try to gain their compliance by indicating that: (a) you don't want to make a bad impression nor do you have bad intentions, (b) you don't really want to make the request and you are only doing so reluctantly, and/or (c) you simply have no choice but to make the request. Example: \"I'm sorry that I am asking you for money, I'm really not a beggar.\"\nDisclaimer (Target): Try to get others to comply by acknowledging and sympathizing with why they may not want to do so. That is, try to gain their compliance by indicating that: (a) you understand and are aware of their reasons, feelings, and abilities, and/or (b) that you are sensitive to their needs and concerns even though you must ask them to do what you want. Example: \"I know that you're disappointed that you can't go on the trip, but do you mind helping me get the presentation ready?\"\nDisclaimer (Task): Try to get others to comply by downplaying what you are asking them to do. That is, try to gain their compliance by indicating that what you want them to do isn't what they think it is and shouldn't pose a problem; it isn't awful, effortful, difficult, or dumb. Example: \"Updating the database shouldn't take that much time.\"\nDisclaimer (Time): Try to get others to comply by downplaying or disavowing being busy as a reason to refuse your request. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that there is or soon will be enough time for them to do what you want. Example: \"We should go to the store now, you can finish your report later.\"\nDuty: Try to get others to comply by pointing out it is their duty to do so. That is, try to gain their compliance by stating they should fulfill obligations, responsibilities, and commitments that they have. Example: \"Taking out the trash at the end of the day is a part of your job.\"\nEquity: Try to get others to comply on the grounds that it is equitable to do so. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that being fair, just, and impartial means they should do what you want. Example: \"Your brother cleaned the house last time; it's your turn now.\"\nEsteem (Negative) by Others: Try to get others to comply by pointing out that, if they do not do so, other people will think worse of them. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that in the eyes of others they will be viewed more negatively if they don't do what you want. Example: \"If you don't go to that college, other people will think you're going to a party school.\"\nEsteem (Positive) by Others: Try to get others to comply by pointing out that, if they do so, other people will think better of them. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that in the eyes of others they will be viewed more positively if they do what you want. Example: \"If you play football, everyone will think that you're really tough.\"\nEsteem (Negative) by Actor: Try to get others to comply by pointing out that, if they do not do so, you will think worse of them. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that in your eyes they will be viewed more negatively if they don't do what you want. Example: \"I would be really disappointed if you went to the party instead of studying.\"\nEsteem (Positive) by Actor: Try to get others to comply by pointing out that, if they do so, you will think better of them. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that in your eyes they will be viewed more positively if they do what you want. Example: \"If you went to law school, I would have a new level of respect for you.\"\nExpertise (Negative): Try to get others to comply by pointing out that because of the way the world works, unfavorable things will happen if they don't change their behavior. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that in the natural course of things, bad outcomes will occur if they don't do what you want. Example: \"You will get the flu, if you don't get a flu shot.\"\nExpertise (Positive): Try to get others to comply by pointing out that because the way the world works, favorable things will happen if they change their behavior. That is, try to gain their compliance by noting that in the natural course of things, good outcomes will occur if they do what you want. Example: \"If you work hard at your job, you're sure to get that promotion.\"\nHinting: Try to get others to comply by hinting around at what you want them to do. That is, try to gain their compliance by indicating indirectly what you want, hoping they will figure it out and comply even though you never come out and really say it. Example: \"I left the trash by the front door, so Dan would take it out.\" \nI Want: Try to get others to comply for no reason other than you want them to. That is, try to gain their compliance by telling them to do what you want because you desire it. Example: \"I want you to go with me to the city.\"\nInvoke Norm: Try to get others to comply by indicating they would be out of step with the norm if they didn't do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by prodding them to conform to what others have, do, or desire. Example: \"Everyone is going to the gym after work.\"\nIt's Up to You: Try to get others to comply by telling them the decision is theirs to make and it's up to them. That is, try to gain their compliance by telling them the choice to comply is up to them. Example: \"It's up to you to save your money, instead of spending it on video games.\"\nLogical Empirical: Try to get others to comply by making logical arguments. That is, try to gain their compliance through the use of reasoning, evidence, facts, and data. Example: \"Statistics show that non-smokers live longer than smokers.\"\nMoral Appeal: Try to get others to comply by appealing to their moral or ethical standards. That is, try to gain their compliance by letting them know what is right and what is wrong. Example: \"Don't buy those shoes they are made using child labor.\"\nMy Concern for You: Try to get others to comply because of your concern for them. That is, try to gain their compliance by referring to your regard for, consideration of, interest in, and feelings for them. Example: \"Please go to the doctor, I'm worried about you.\"\nNature of Situation: Try to get others to comply by being attentive to the situation or circumstances you find yourselves in. That is, try to gain their compliance by taking note of the appropriateness of their behavior to the situation and/or the appropriateness of your request in the situation. Example: \"I told my son that the bed was not a trampoline.\" \nNegative Affect: Try to get others to comply by being really negative: expressing negative emotions, acting really unfriendly, and creating an unappealing impression. That is, try to gain their compliance by acting displeased to get them to do what you want. Example: \"Angrily, I told her to put her phone on silent after it went off in class..\"\nNot Seek Compliance: No attempt is made to get others to do what you want. That is, no compliance is sought. Example: \"I didn't ask if I could go out tonight.\"\nPersistence: Try to get others to comply by being persistent. That is, try to gain their compliance by persevering (continuing) in your attempts to get them to do what you want. Example: \"After asking for over a year, we are finally getting a pool.\"\nPersonal Expertise: Try to get others to comply by referring to your credibility (your personal expertise). That is, try to gain their compliance based on your experience, know-how, trustworthiness, and judgment. Example: \"You should get those shoes, I have them and they feel great when running. \nPositive Affect: Try to get others to comply by being really positive: expressing positive emotions, acting really friendly, and creating an appealing impression. That is, try to gain their compliance by charming them into doing what you want. Example: \"She was really happy, when she asked for a raise.\"\nPre-Giving: Try to get others to comply by doing positive and nice things for them in advance of asking them to do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by giving them things they'd like and then only afterwards making your request. Example: \"I bought my wife flowers, then later asked if I could go fishing this weekend.\"\nPromise: Try to get others to comply by making a promise. That is, try to gain their compliance by offering to give them a reward or something they'd like if they do what is wanted. Example: \"If you behave in the store, I promise that we will stop for ice cream on the way home.\"\nPromote Task: Try to get others to comply by promoting the value and worth of what you want them to do. That is, try to gain their compliance by identifying one or more positive qualities of the thing you are asking them to do (e.g., what you want them to do is important, meaningful, rewarding, enjoyable etc.). Example: \"If you complete this presentation on time, you will be less stressed and will get a good grade.\"\nSelf-Feeling (Negative): Try to get others to comply by stating that not doing so will result in an automatic decrease in their self-worth. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that they will feel worse about themselves if they don't do what you want. Example: \"You will feel bad if you throw all that food away instead of donating it.\"\nSelf-Feeling (Positive): Try to get others to comply by stating that doing so will result in an automatic increase in their self-worth. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that they will feel better about themselves if they do what you want. Example: \"You will feel better if you donate that old coat to charity instead of selling it in the garage sale.\" \nSuggest: Try to get others to comply by offering suggestions about what it is you want them to do. That is, try to gain their compliance by subtly proposing an idea that indirectly points out and describes what it is you want them to do. Example: \"Why don't you try the steak instead of the chicken?\"\nSurveillance: Try to get others to comply by indicating your awareness and observation of what they do. That is, try to gain their compliance by referring to your general vigilance, surveillance, scrutiny, and/or monitoring of their behavior. Example: \"I will find out if you're lying to me about the car accident.\" \nThird Party: Try to get others to comply by having someone else ask them for you. That is, try to gain their compliance by getting someone else to intervene and do it for you. Example: \"Jane don't you think Jim should go on that date with the girl from accounting.\" \nThis Is the Way Things Are: Try to get others to comply by telling them they have to because that is just the way things are. That is, try to gain their compliance by referring to rules, procedures, policies, or customs that require them to comply. Example: \"You should slow down since the speed limit is only 25 mph.\"\nThought Manipulation: Try to get others to comply by convincing them that the request you are making is really their own idea. That is, try to gain their compliance by having them think they were the ones who really wanted to do it in the first place. Example: \"We should go on the roller coaster, since you wanted to come to the fair in the first place.\" \nThreat: Try to get others to comply by threatening them. That is, try to gain their compliance by saying you will punish them if they don't do what you want. Example: \"If you go to the bar again tonight, consider us done.\" \nValue Appeal: Try to get others to comply because of important values that compel action in this instance. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing to central and joint beliefs that should guide what they do. Example: \"Since we both care about the ocean, we should volunteer for the cleanup.\"\nWarning: Try to get others to comply by warning them about what they are doing. That is, try to gain their compliance by alerting them to possible negative consequences of their behavior. Example: \"You might get fired if you stay up all night.\" \nWelfare (Others): Try to get others to comply by telling them how other people would be hurt if they don't do what you want. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out that the welfare of other people is at stake. Example: \"If you are not going to be in the family photo then we won't take one.\" \nWhy Not?: Try to get others to comply by making them justify why they should not. That is, try to gain their compliance by pointing out there are no real grounds for not doing so. Example: \"Why wouldn't you help your sister?\"\nYour Concern for Me: Try to get others to comply because of their concern for you. That is, try to gain their compliance by referring to their regard for, consideration of, interest in, and feelings for you. Example: \"If you really cared for me then you would go to the dance recital.\"\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n \n Dillard, J.P. (2004). The goals-plans-action model of interpersonal influence. In J. S. Seiter & R. H. Gass (Eds.) Readings in persuasion, social influence, and compliance gaining (pp. 185–206). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.\n French, J. P. R., Jr., & Raven, B. (1960). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright & A. Zander (Eds.), Group dynamics (pp. 607–623). New York: Harper & Row.\n \n \n \n McQuillen, J. S., Higginbotham, D. C., & Cummings, M. C. (1984). Compliance-resisting behaviors: The effects of age, agent, and types of request. In R. N. Bostrom (Ed.), Communication yearbook 8 (pp. 747–762). Beverly Hills: SAGE.\n \n \n Wheeless, L. R., Barraclough, R., & Stewart, R. (1983). Compliance-gaining and power in persuasion. In R. Bostrom (Ed.), Communication yearbook 7 (pp. 105–145). Beverly Hills: Sage.\n\nPersuasion\nAttitude change\nSociological theories",
"The Real Donovan is the first compilation album from Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. It was released in the US (Hickory LPM 135 (monaural) /LPS 135 (stereo)) in September 1966.\n\nHistory\nWhen Donovan signed a contract with Epic Records, he became entangled in a legal dispute with Pye Records over the rights to his music. These legal proceedings withheld any new Donovan releases in the United Kingdom until late 1966. In the meantime, Pye Records' United States distributor Hickory Records compiled The Real Donovan from Donovan's Pye Records releases, choosing several songs that had not yet appeared on any United States release.\n\nThe Real Donovan was released within the same month as Donovan's first Epic Records album Sunshine Superman. Both albums were intended to capitalize on the success of the \"Sunshine Superman\" single, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in the United States. While it did not match the Billboard chart success and sales of Sunshine Superman, The Real Donovan did chart, ultimately reaching No. 96.\n\nAlbum origins of tracks\nThe following is a list explaining the original releases of each song. Tracks that were previously unreleased in the United States are noted with *, followed by explanations of their origin.\n\n \"Turquoise\" (UK single, released 30 October 1965; Released in U.S. as b-side to \"To Try for the Sun\" in January 1966)\n \"Oh Deed I Do\"* (from UK version of Fairytale, released 22 October 1965)\n \"Catch the Wind\" (from What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, released 14 May 1965)\n \"Remember the Alamo\" (from What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, released 14 May 1965)\n \"Ballad of a Crystal Man\"* (from The Universal Soldier EP, released 15 August 1965)\n \"Colours\" (from Fairytale, released 22 October 1965)\n \"Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)\"* (b-side of \"Turquoise\", released 30 October 1965)\n \"Belated Forgiveness Plea\" (from Fairytale, released 22 October 1965)\n \"Ramblin' Boy\" (from What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, released 14 May 1965)\n \"The War Drags On\"* (from The Universal Soldier EP, released 15 August 1965)\n \"Josie\" (from What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, released 14 May 1965)\n \"To Try for the Sun\" (from Fairytale, released 22 October 1965)\n\nTrack listing\nAll tracks by Donovan Leitch, except where noted.\n\nSide one\n\n\"Turquoise\"\n\"Oh Deed I Do\" (Bert Jansch)\n\"Catch the Wind\"\n\"Remember the Alamo\" (Jane Bowers)\n\"Ballad of a Crystal Man\"\n\"Colours\"\n\nSide two\n\n\"Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)\"\n\"Belated Forgiveness Plea\"\n\"Rambin' Boy\"\n\"The War Drags On\" (Mick Softley)\n\"Josie\"\n\"To Try for the Sun\"\n\nExternal links\n The Real Donovan – Donovan Unofficial Site\n\nReal Donovan\nReal Donovan\nHickory Records compilation albums"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent."
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
What did they say
| 3 |
What did Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough say
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons.
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"No Matter What They Say is a song by Lil' Kim\n\nNo Matter What They Say\tmay also refer to:\n\"No Matter What They Say\", song by Denise LaSalle\t1978\n\"No Matter What They Say\", song by Priscilla Hernández \n\"No Matter What They Say\", song by Heinz (singer)\tMeek, Lawrence 1964\n\"No Matter What They Say\", song by Booker T. & the MG's, sampled in \"Shamrocks and Shenanigans\" on House of Pain (album)\n\"No Matter What They Say\", song by Raptile",
"\"No Matter What They Say\" is a song by Lil' Kim, released as the first single from her second album The Notorious K.I.M., released in 2000. It reached number 60 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number 35 on the UK Singles Chart.\n\nBackground\n\"No Matter What They Say\" was not Kim's first choice as the lead single from the album. Kim did not want the song released as she felt the Spanish sound had already been done so many times due to the Latin pop explosion of the late 90s. Instead Kim wanted \"The Queen\", one of the songs that leaked prior to the album's release, as her first single. The record label didn't agree with Kim and insisted on releasing \"No Matter What They Say\". With time running out and not wanting her first week album sales to suffer, Kim agreed with her label to release the song. \"The Queen\" never made it on the album's final track listing.\n\nSamples\nThis song sampled many other songs, including:\n\"Esto es el Guaguanco\" by Cheo Feliciano\n\"I Got It Made\" by Special Ed\n\"I Know You Got Soul\" by Eric B. & Rakim\n\"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang\n\nThe song also samples the line 'I'm just tryna be me, doing what I gotta do' from \"Top of the World\" by Brandy as well as \"This is how it should be done\" from Roxanne's On A Roll by The Real Roxanne.\n\nMusic video \nThe accompanying music video for \"No Matter What They Say\" was filmed in Los Angeles and directed by Marcus Raboy in early June 2000. It features cameo appearances from Puff Daddy, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott, Method Man & Redman, Xzibit, Junior M.A.F.I.A. and Carmen Electra. The video needed some digital retouches, such was \"nipple fixes\" for when Kim wiggles out of her Versace bustiers and computer-edited T-shirts for her backup girls (they were altered to \"itty girls\"). Cameo dancer Carmen Electra had her underwear altered as well. \"It's not like you could really see anything. It's just the freeze-frame factor you have to consider\", said director Marcus Raboy. The music video premiered on Total Request Live (TRL) on June 20, 2000.\n\nTrack listings\n\nUS Promo CD\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Radio Edit) - 4:19\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Album Version) - 5:35\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Instrumental) - 4:21\n\nEurope CD single\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Radio Edit) - 4:18\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Album Version) - 4:14\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Instrumental) - 4:19\n\"No Matter What They Say\" (Acappella) - 4:26\n\nCredits and personnel\nCredits for \"No Matter What They Say\" are taken from the single's liner notes.\n\nRecording\nRecorded at Daddy's House Recording Studios.\nRecorded by Stephen Dent\n\nPersonnel\n Lil' Kim – lead vocals\n K. Jones, D. Henson, J. Feliciano, Eric B. & Rakim, E. Archer, R. Beavers, J. Hill, P. Jovner, D. Taylor, H. Thomas, N. Rodgers, B. Edwards – songwriting\n Darren \"Limitless\" Henson – producer\n Rich Travali – mixing\n Chris Athens – audio mastering\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2000 singles\nLil' Kim songs\nMusic videos directed by Marcus Raboy\n1999 songs\nAtlantic Records singles\nSongs written by Lil' Kim\nSongs written by Bernard Edwards\nSongs written by Nile Rodgers"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.",
"What did they say",
"One of four sons, McCullough had a \"marvelous\" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons."
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
What was his next weekened
| 4 |
What was David McCullough's next weekened
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"Channel 4 was a free-to-air digital channel. It was only available in Sydney, Australia.\n\nChannel 4 was an electronic program guide that lists ABC, Channel Seven, Channel Nine, Channel Ten and SBS, it showed what was on each channel, then changed to what was coming up next. The station logo, time the program starts, and classification are shown. At the bottom of the screen, is a list of primetime programming for each station plus ABC2 and Digital Channel 44. ABC2 and ABC1 alternate in the same row in the now/next section.\n\nDigital terrestrial television in Australia",
"The NeXT Introduction sub-titled \"the Introduction to the NeXT Generation of Computers for Education\"\" was a lavish, invitation-only gala launch event for The NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) was described as a multimedia extravaganza. It was held at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, California on Wednesday October 12, 1988. The event ran from 9:30am till 12 noon. Attendees were all given a unique launch event poster.\n\nAfter Steve Jobs departed Apple three years prior to this event, he sank from sight only emerging once in 1986 to unveil the NeXT logo and once in early 1987 to announce that H. Ross Perot had invested $20 million in NeXT inc. Otherwise, Steve Jobs shunned public appearances at computer-industry events to avoid having to comment publicly about his new company's activities. But then he re-emerged with this Launch in what was described as having \"the subtlety of a Hollywood première\" in what was his first major public appearance since leaving Apple. Jobs hired multimedia artist George Coates to stage the unveiling.\n\nAt the time, it was considered that this event was the launch of not just a new computer but also a new Steve Jobs. With Jobs himself telling his audience \"It's great to be back.\"\n\nMore than 3000 invitations were sent out to educators, software developers & reporters for the launch event but not a single Apple employee was invited.\n\nThe company rented the Davies Symphony Hall, supposedly because of its good acoustics, to show off the DSPs that allowed the Cube to play full stereo sound. The machine played a duet with one of the symphony’s violinists.\n\nJobs opened the show with a purpose built animation built by NeXT UI Architect Keith Ohlfs, demonstrating the history of computer interfaces and the multi-tasking capabilities of the NeXT computer.\n\nThe following day 13 October saw the follow-up event \"The NeXT Day\" where selected educators and software developers were invited (for $100 registration fee) to send up to four key individuals to attend the first public technical overview of the NeXT computer which was held at the San Francisco Hilton. This event gave developers interested in developing NeXT software an insight into the software architecture, object-oriented programming and developing for the NeXT Computer. The luncheon speaker was Steve Jobs.\n\nThe program was designed for experienced developers and provided a technical overview of the NeXT software architecture and development environment.\n\nThis Launch event was replicated at other venues over the following days at other locations such as Boston’s Symphony Hall and University of California, Riverside.\n\nThe Agenda\n\nEach attendee received an agenda for the day:\n\nLaunch Poster\n\nThe launch poster was given to delegates of the launch event. It measured 37\" by 17\" and was printed on heavy poster paper. The poster's design consisted of a NeXT Computer, Screen, Keyboard, Mouse and Laser Printer. It also incorporated the NeXT logo designed by Paul Rand and the text \"October 12, 1988 - Computing Advances To The NeXT Level\".\n\nReferences\n\n1988 in San Francisco\nNeXT"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.",
"What did they say",
"One of four sons, McCullough had a \"marvelous\" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons.",
"What was his next weekened",
"School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh."
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
What was there next choice
| 5 |
What was David McCullough next choice after School and Shady Side Academy
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age.
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"Jennifer Ward (born December 4, 1963) is an American children's picture book author. Many of her books focus on science, nature and the Sonoran Desert. Ward has a B.A. in education from the University of Arizona.\n\nHer books have been translated into many languages and have received the International Reading Association's / CBC Children's Choice Award, the American Booksellers Association Book Sense Summer Pick, a Learning Magazine Teachers' Choice Award for Best Children's Picture Book, a Parents' Choice Award, a Governor's Selection for the states of New Jersey and Arizona, the Grand Canyon Reader Award, among other honors. Her book, There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea has been integrated into the architecture at the Buckeye Public Library in Buckeye, Arizona.\n\nBibliography \nI Love Birds! 52 Ways to Wonder, Wander and Explore Birds with Kids (2019)\nMama Dug a Little Den (2018)\nFeathers and Hair, What Animals Wear (2017)\nWhat Will Grow? (2017)\nThere Was an Old Mummy Who Swallowed a Spider (2015)\nThere Was an Old Martian Who Swallowed the Moon (2015)\nMama Built a Little Nest (2014)\nThe Sunhat (2013)\nWhat Will Hatch? (2013)\nThere Was an Old Pirate Who Swallowed a Fish (2012)\nIt's a Jungle Out There! 52 Nature Activities for City Kids (2011)\nThere Was an Odd Princess Who Swallowed a Pea (2011)\nThere Was an Old Monkey Who Swallowed a Frog (2010)\nLet's Go Outside! Outdoor Activities and Projects to Get You and Your Kids Closer to Nature (2009)\nThe Busy Tree (2009)\nI Love Dirt! 52 Projects to Help You and Your Kids Discover the Wonders of Nature (2008)\nWay Up in the Arctic (2007)\nBecause You Are My Baby (2007)\nThere Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea(2007)\nForest Bright, Forest Night board book (2007)\nForest Bright, Forest Night (2005)\nThe Little Creek (2004)\nWay Out in the Desert board book (2003)\nOver in the Garden (2003)\nThe Seed and the Giant Saguaro(2003)\nSomewhere in the Ocean (2000)\nWay Out in the Desert (1998)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAuthor's web site\n\nLiving people\n1963 births\nUniversity of Arizona alumni\nAmerican children's writers\nWriters from Tucson, Arizona\nWriters from Illinois\n21st-century American women writers",
"What Do You Know About Love? is an album by singer and actress Della Reese. The album was her fifth for Jubilee Records, and it was directed and conducted by Reg Owen.\n\nThe album was released on Compact Disc alongside her 1958 album Amen!, for the first time in 2008, by Collector's Choice.\n\nTrack listing\n\n \"What Do You Know About Love?\" (Good, Scarf) 3:09\n \"When I Fall in Love\" (Heyman, Young) 3:13\n \"Something I Dreamed Last Night\" (Fain, Magidson, Yellen) 3:33\n \"I Got It Bad\" (Ellington, Webster) 3:20\n \"I'll Never Be The Same\" (Kahn, Malneck, Signorelli) 2:13\n \"You Better Go Now\" (Graham, Reichner) 2:45\n \"I'm Nobody's Baby\" (Ager, Davis, Santly) 3:11\n \"I Never Knew\" (Egan, Marsh, Pitts, Whiteman) 3:07\n \"I Thought of You Last Night\" (Freed) 2:10 \n \"You Don't Know What Love Is\" (DePaul, Raye) 2:40 \n \"I'm Thru with Love\" (Kahn, Livingston, Malneck) 3:19\n \"That's All There Is\" (Jenkins) 2:21\n\nReferences\n\nDella Reese albums\nBig band albums\nJubilee Records albums\n1959 albums\nAlbums conducted by Reg Owen\nCollectors' Choice Music albums"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.",
"What did they say",
"One of four sons, McCullough had a \"marvelous\" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons.",
"What was his next weekened",
"School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.",
"What was there next choice",
"McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age."
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
What did they joke about
| 6 |
What did David McCullough joke about
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"A dad joke is a short joke, typically a pun, presented as a one-liner or a question and answer, but not a narrative.\n\nMany dad jokes may be considered anti-jokes, deriving humor from an intentionally funny punchline.\n\nA common type of dad joke goes as follows: A child will say to the father, \"I'm hungry,\" to which the father will reply, \"Hi, Hungry, I'm Dad.\"\n\nWhile the exact origin of the term dad joke is unknown, a writer for the Gettysburg Times wrote an impassioned defence of the genre in June 1987 under the headline \"Don't ban the 'Dad' jokes; preserve and revere them\". The term \"dad jokes\" received mentions in the American sitcom How I Met Your Mother in 2008 and the Australian quiz show Spicks and Specks in 2009. In September 2019, Merriam-Webster added the phrase \"dad joke\" to the dictionary.\n\nExamples \n\n Q: What do you call a dad joke that falls on its head? A: A dud pun.\nQ: On Thanksgiving, why did the turkey cross the table? A: To get to the other sides.\nA ham sandwich walks into a bar and the bartender says...Sorry we don't serve food here.\nQ: What do you call a mermaid on a roof? A: Aerial.\nQ: What does a highlighter say when it answers the phone? A: Yello!!\nI am wrapping Christmas presents. Let’s put on some rap music.\nQ: What's Irish and comes out in the spring? A: Paddy O'Furniture.\nQ: What's orange and sounds like a parrot? A: A carrot.\nQ: What's the opposite of water? A: Yellow snow.\nQ: Where does a sick fish go? A: The doc.\nQ: What do a tick and the Eiffel Tower have in common? A: They're both Paris sites.\nQ What's the difference between a pun and a Dad joke? It will become apparent.\nQ What did the fish say when he swam into the wall? Dam!\nThey've tried to improve the efficiency of wind farms by playing country music around them, but it's not working because they're really just big heavy metal fans.\nI used to be addicted to the hokey pokey, but I turned myself around.\nPlateaus are the highest form of flattery.\nMy uncle just got fired from his job at the cheese factory. He kept getting in the whey.\nGranddad always told me that things could be worse -- I could fall into a deep hole full of water, but I knew he meant well.\nQ: Whose concert costs only 45 cents? 50 Cent featuring Nickelback\n\nSee also \n\n Mom joke\n\nReferences \n\nFatherhood\nHumour\nJokes\nPejorative terms",
"A riddle joke, joke riddle, pseudo-joke or conundrum is a riddle that does not expect the asked person to know the answer, but rather constitutes a set-up to the humorous punch line of the joke.\n\nIt is one of the four major types of riddles, according to Nigel F. Barley. There are many cycles of jokes in the form of a conundrum, such as Elephant jokes, \"Why did the chicken cross the road?\" and lightbulb jokes.\n\nJoke cycles implying inferiority or other stereotypes of certain categories of people, such as blonde jokes, or ethnic jokes (such as Pollack joke) have a considerable amount of joke riddles.\n\nExamples \n Elephant joke\n Lightbulb joke\n Newspaper riddle\n \"Why did the chicken cross the road?\"\n Radio Yerevan jokes\n\nAbstract riddles\nIn areas which have historical ties with Asia Minor, such as Greece, Turkey, Armenia, of popularity are \"abstract riddles\" that follow templates: \"What is this: A inside and B outside?\" or \"What is this: A is around and B in the middle?\". For example:\n\nReferences\n\nJoke cycles\nRiddles"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.",
"What did they say",
"One of four sons, McCullough had a \"marvelous\" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons.",
"What was his next weekened",
"School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.",
"What was there next choice",
"McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age.",
"What did they joke about",
"parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough \"loved school, every day"
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
What did he read about
| 7 |
What did David McCullough read about
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time.
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| false |
[
"\"Read My Lips\" is a song written and performed by Scottish singer-songwriter Jimmy Somerville (formerly of the bands Bronski Beat and The Communards) from his 1989 début solo album Read My Lips. The song discusses the need for increased funding to fight HIV/AIDS.\n\nReleased in 1990 as Somerville's third solo single from the album Read My Lips, the song didn't chart as well as the previous single, \"You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)\", a cover of the Sylvester original, which hit number 5 earlier the same year. However, it did chart inside the Top 40, peaking at number 26 on the UK Singles Chart, and was featured on Now That's What I Call Music! volume 17.\n\nTrack listing\n12\" Vinyl Single - London Recordings (UK Release)\n\"Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)\"\n\"Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)\"\n\"Strangers \"\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1989 songs\nJimmy Somerville songs\n1990 singles\nSongs written by Jimmy Somerville\nSongs about HIV/AIDS\nLondon Records singles\nLGBT-related songs",
"The Katy series is a set of novels by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, writing under the pen-name of Susan Coolidge. The first in the series, What Katy Did, was published in 1872 and followed the next year by What Katy Did at School. What Katy Did Next was released in 1886. Two further novels, Clover (1888) and In the High Valley (1890), focused upon other members of the eponymous character's family. The series was popular with readers in the late 19th century.\n\nThe series was later adapted into a TV series entitled Katy in 1962, and two films, one also called Katy in 1972 and What Katy Did in 1999.\n\nNovels\n What Katy Did\n What Katy Did at School\n What Katy Did Next\n Clover\n In the High Valley\n\nAdaptions\n Katy (TV series, 1962)\n Katy (film, 1972)\n What Katy Did (film, 1999)\n\nLiterary Criticism\nCritics are divided about how much the series played into period gender norms and often compare the series to Little Women. Foster and Simmons argue for its subversion of gender in their book What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of ‘Classic’ Stories for Girls by suggesting the series “deconstructs family hierarchies”.\n\nInfluence\nThe series is unusual for its time by having an entry which focuses not on the family life at home but at school in What Katy Did at School.\n\nIn a 1995 survey, What Katy Did was voted as one of the top 10 books for 12-year-old girls.\n\nSee also\n\nSarah Chauncey Woolsey\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nSeries details at Fantastic Fiction\n\nKaty series\n1870s novels\nNovel series\nSeries of children's books\nNovels by Susan Coolidge\n1880s novels\n1890s novels\n1962 American television series debuts\n1972 films\n1999 films"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.",
"What did they say",
"One of four sons, McCullough had a \"marvelous\" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons.",
"What was his next weekened",
"School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.",
"What was there next choice",
"McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age.",
"What did they joke about",
"parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough \"loved school, every day",
"What did he read about",
"he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time."
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
what was his next adventure
| 8 |
what was David McCullough's next adventure
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"SS Empire Adventure was a 5,787 ton steamship which was built in 1920 as the Eastney. She was sold to France in 1924 and renamed Germaine L D. In 1931 she was sold to Italy, being renamed Andrea, being seized in 1940 and renamed Empire Adventure. She was torpedoed on the night of 20/21 September 1940 and sank whilst under tow on 23 September 1940.\n\nHistory\nEastney was built by the Northumberland Shipping Co, Howdon, Wallsend, as yard number 356. She was owned and operated by the Romney Steamship Co, London. In 1924, Eastney was sold to L Dreyfus & Co, France and renamed Germaine L D. On 25 March 1929, she was in collision with in the North Sea off Vlissingen, Netherlands. She was beached at Rammekens for temporary repairs to be carried out. Germaine L D was refloated the next day. On 3 March 1931, she collided with at Rotterdam, Netherlands. Southborough sustained some damage but Germaine L D was undamaged. On 23 March 1932, she ran aground at Buenos Aires, Argentina, but was freed the next day with assistance from a tug. No damage was sustained. In 1932, Germaine L D was sold to Società Anonima di Navigazione Corrado, Genoa and renamed Andrea. In June 1940, Andrea was seized at Newcastle upon Tyne and renamed Empire Adventure.\n\nConvoy OB 216\n\nConvoy OB 216 departed from Liverpool on 19 September 1940. During the night of 20/21 September 1940, Empire Adventure was torpedoed by northwest of Rathlin Island . Although taken in tow by HMS Superman, Empire Adventure sank on 23 September 1940 at . A total of 21 of the 39 crew were killed. The survivors were picked up by and the Swedish merchantman Industria and landed at Belfast. Those lost on Empire Adventure are commemorated at the Tower Hill Memorial, London.\n\nOfficial number and code letters\nOfficial Numbers were a forerunner to IMO Numbers.\n\nEastney and Empire Adventure had the UK Official Number 146165 Andrea had the Italian Official Number 1829.\n\nAndrea used the Code Letters NDAT and IBXA. Empire Adventure used the Code Letters GLXW.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Photo of Germaine L D\n\n1920 ships\nShips built on the River Tyne\nSteamships of the United Kingdom\nEmpire ships\nMinistry of War Transport ships\nSteamships of France\nMerchant ships of France\nMaritime incidents in 1929\nSteamships of Italy\nWorld War II merchant ships of Italy\nShips sunk by German submarines in World War II\nWorld War II shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean\nMaritime incidents in September 1940\nShipwrecks of Northern Ireland",
"The Apocalypse Stone is an adventure module for the 2nd edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. It was published in 2000.\n\nPlot summary\nThe Apocalypse Stone is an adventure designed for 4-6 characters of level 15 and above. It is intended to be the final adventure of a long-running campaign, which is likely to bring about the end of a campaign world.\n\nPublication history\nThe Apocalypse Stone was published by Wizards of the Coast, and was written by Jason Carl and Chris Pramas.\n\nReception\nThe Apocalypse Stone was reviewed in Volume 2 of Pyramid on January 21, 2000. The reviewer noted that the adventure is designed for powerful characters and noted that it \"would work best as part of a seriously long-running (years at least) campaign\". The reviewer remained intentionally vague about \"the details of the bigger picture of this adventure as the potential enjoyment of this adventure depends heavily upon the DM keeping his/her players in the dark as to what's really going on. If you run this one correctly your players won't be disappointed. They may very well end up seriously ticked off, but not disappointed.\"\n\nReferences\n\nDungeons & Dragons modules"
] |
[
"David McCullough",
"Youth and growth",
"Where was he born",
"McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,",
"What did they try next",
"the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.",
"What did they say",
"One of four sons, McCullough had a \"marvelous\" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons.",
"What was his next weekened",
"School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.",
"What was there next choice",
"McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age.",
"What did they joke about",
"parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough \"loved school, every day",
"What did he read about",
"he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time.",
"what was his next adventure",
"In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a \"privilege\" to study English at Yale"
] |
C_98c9d8a0c8b74234bb5eff5d2f0dfe4e_1
|
Why was this an honor
| 9 |
Why was attending Yale University an honor
|
David McCullough
|
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time. In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction. While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature (1955). CANNOTANSWER
|
John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder.
|
David Gaub McCullough (; born July 7, 1933) is an American author, narrator, popular historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968); and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.
McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams., have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a miniseries, respectively.
Life and career
Youth and education
McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ruth (née Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, ranging from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and considered attending medical school for a time.
In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale University. He said that it was a "privilege" to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.
While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life." While attending Yale, McCullough studied Arts and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with the intention of becoming a fiction writer or playwright. He graduated with honors in English literature in 1955.
Writing career
Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years in editing and writing, including a position at American Heritage, McCullough "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own."
McCullough "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history, but [he] stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." While working at American Heritage, McCullough wrote in his spare time for three years. The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, of The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite rough financial times, he decided to become a full-time writer, encouraged by his wife Rosalee.
Gaining recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second book. Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough", he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it." McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. It was published in 1972.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.
Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award. Later in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.
"The story of people"
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people". Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from Roosevelt's childhood to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award. Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays that "unfold seamlessly". Written over twenty years, the book includes essays about Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Richter, and Frederic Remington.
With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president. The book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize, in the category of "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as Truman (1995), a television film by HBO, starring Gary Sinise as Truman.
I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.<p style="text-align: right;"> – David McCullough
Working for the next seven years, McCullough published John Adams (2001), his third biography about a United States president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, the book won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" in 2002. He started it as a book about the founding fathers and back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams. HBO adapted John Adams as a seven-part miniseries by the same name. Premiering in 2008, it starred Paul Giamatti in the title role. The DVD version of the miniseries includes the biographical documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words.
McCullough's 1776 tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book was a number one best-seller in the United States. A miniseries adaptation of 1776 was rumored.
McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776. However, he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, which was published in 2011. The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, who had been Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.
McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published in 2015. The Pioneers followed in 2019, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory, a vast American wilderness to which the Ohio River was the gateway.
Personal life
David McCullough has a home in Hingham, Massachusetts, since moving in 2016 from Boston's Back Bay; three of his five children reside in Hingham. He has a summer home in Camden, Maine. He is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple have five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history, and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.
His son, David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. Another son, Bill, is married to the daughter of former Florida governor Bob Graham.
A registered independent, McCullough has typically avoided publicly commenting on contemporary political issues. When asked to do so, he would repeatedly say, "My specialty is dead politicians." During the 2016 presidential election season, he broke with his custom to criticize Donald Trump, whom he called "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."
McCullough has taught a writing course at Wesleyan University and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University as well as Dartmouth College.
Awards and accolades
McCullough has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in December 2006, the highest civilian award that a United States citizen can receive. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
McCullough has been awarded more than 40 honorary degrees, including one from the Eastern Nazarene College in John Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts.
McCullough has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Francis Parkman Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, New York Public Library's Literary Lion Award, and the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, among others. McCullough was chosen to deliver the first annual John Hersey Lecture at Yale University on March 22, 1993. He is a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of Achievement. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected McCullough for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. McCullough's lecture was titled "The Course of Human Events".
In 1995, McCullough received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
McCullough has been called a "master of the art of narrative history." The New York Times critic John Leonard wrote that McCullough was "incapable of writing a page of bad prose." His works have been published in ten languages, over nine million copies have been printed, and all of his books are still in print.
In December 2012, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania announced that it would rename the 16th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh in honor of McCullough.
In a ceremony at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, on November 16, 2015, the Air University of the United States Air Force awarded McCullough an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. He was also made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale University in 2015.
On May 11, 2016, McCullough received the United States Capitol Historical Society's Freedom Award. It was presented in the National Statuary Hall.
In September 2016, McCullough received the Gerry Lenfest Spirit of the American Revolution Award from the Museum of the American Revolution.
Works
Books
Narrations
McCullough has narrated many television shows and documentaries throughout his career. In addition to narrating the 2003 film Seabiscuit, McCullough hosted PBS's American Experience from 1988 to 1999. McCullough has narrated numerous documentaries directed by Ken Burns, including the Emmy Award-winning The Civil War, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, and The Congress. He served as a guest narrator for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert special that aired on PBS in 2010.
McCullough has narrated some of his own audiobooks, including introductions for the anniversary edition of The Great Bridge and The Greater Journey and the entire audiobooks of 1776 and The Wright Brothers.
List of films presented or narrated
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
Smithsonian World (5 episodes, 1984–1988)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
A Man, A Plan, A Canal : Panama (NOVA) (1987)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (9 episodes, 1990)
American Experience (23 episodes, 1991–2006)
Coney Island (1991)
The Donner Party (1992)
Degenerate Art (1993)
D-Day Remembered (1994)
Napoleon-PBS Empires Special (2000)
George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire (2000)
Seabiscuit (2003)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (2010)
Notes
References
External links
David McCullough at Simon & Schuster
In Depth interview with McCullough, December 2, 2001
Speech Transcript: "Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are" at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "American History and America's Future."
1933 births
Living people
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American historians
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American Experience
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American political writers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of the United States
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Shady Side Academy alumni
Skull and Bones Society
Writers from Pittsburgh
Yale College alumni
| true |
[
"Lupercus or Lubercus or Luberkus was a god in Roman mythology. Lupercus was a protector of the farmers, harvesting and packs of wild animals. Every year on 15 February in honor of him, the Romans held the Lupercalia. He was an ancient Italian god, worshipped by shepherds as the promoter of fertility in sheep and protector of flocks.\n\nHe helped the she-wolf take care of Romulus and Remus; this is why Lupercalia was a celebration that helped pregnant women.\n\nLupercus is sometimes identified with the god Pan in Greek mythology. The Roman god Faunus is a variation of Lupercus, also linked to the festival of Lupercalia.\n\nReferences \n\nRoman gods\nLupercalia\nAgricultural gods\nNature gods",
"The \"Why Mom Deserves a Diamond\" contest is an American essay contest founded by Michael \"Diamond Mike\" Watson in Costa Mesa, California in 1993. The contest was established in honor of Watson's adoptive mother and the birth mother he had never known. In a limited number of words, children are asked to write essays explaining why their mother deserves a diamond.\n\nHundreds of thousands of American children have participated, and dozens of children have won the grand prize of a diamond to give to their mothers (and other precious gems). The first winner was sophomore Margaret Ketchersid, from Edison High School in Huntington Beach, California. On Mother's Day 1993, she was awarded the grand prize of a quarter-carat diamond to give to her mother, Ruth.\n\nFounder \n\nMichael \"Diamond Mike\" Watson was born and adopted in Indianapolis in 1958. He spent his early life in New Albany, where his adopted parents raised him. The foundation of the contest began while Watson was searching for his own birth mother when he was 17.\n\nAbout the same time he started his quest, Watson entered the jewelry industry as an errand boy for a store in New Albany. He joined a retail chain and worked in jewelry stores in Indiana, Kentucky and Kansas City, then moved to California in 1989.\nIn 1991, Watson opened Gallery of Diamonds Jewelers in Costa Mesa, California.\n\nWatson obtained a copy of his hospital bill from Community Hospital, which showed his mother's name (Betty Price) and age. Armed with this information, he embarked on a search that lasted nearly 20 years. Watson found the judge who had presided over the adoption only to learn that the records were sealed. The judge did, however, give Watson the report by the Department of Public Welfare, which contained information about his birth mother. The report listed names and a wedding date, and he contacted every county in Indiana to locate a wedding license. In mid-1994 he heard from the courthouse in Coatesville that the information on the license matched. He found that his birth mother's maiden name was Stewart, and also discovered her parent's address and telephone number. When calling his biological grandmother, she said that no one knew he was alive because his birth mother told the family he was stillborn. He learned that his mother had died in 1981.\n\nWatson then learned he had an infant sister that vanished before he was born. Thus began a new journey to find his missing sibling. With the help of five genealogical researchers in which Watson named the Fabulous Five, Watson finally found his missing sister alive and well in 2017. That same year, with the miracle of DNA matching, Watson discovered his paternal Syrian Jewish roots and that he came from a long ancestry of distinguished rabbis from Aleppo, Syria. His great great grandfather was Hakham Mordechai Abadi. \n\nFrom 1993 to 2012, Watson published the winning entries in an annual book to raise money for the local county's library. Over the years, thousands of children submit their essays to the company's headquarters in Santa Ana, California, and come to Gallery of Diamonds Jewelers every year.\n\nWatson earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Indiana University Southeast and is a gemologist from the Gemological Institute of America. He is the author of Moon Over Mountains- The Search for Mom, The Legend of Why Mom Deserves a Diamond, Tales of Imagination- Everything is Real, In Search of Mom- Journey of an Adoptee, and Adopted Like Me- Chosen to Search for a Birthmother.\n\nIntellectual property \n\nThe trademark Why Mom Deserves a Diamond was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark office on July 27, 2001, registration number 2,620,840. The trademark, The Legendary Contest, received registration on April 17, 2007, as \"A writing contest in which kids can honor their mothers and have the chance to win a diamond or gemstone.\" Reg #3229618.\n\nFranchise \n\nIn 2009, the Why Mom Deserves a Diamond contest became incorporated, and in 2010 it became a franchise with the mission of \"giving every child the opportunity to express their words of appreciation to the mothers.\"\n\nAnthologies \n\nFrom 1993 to 2012, Gallery of Diamonds Jewelers, the founding sponsor of the contest, published an annual anthology of the winners. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of these books were donated to the Orange County Library system in Orange County, California. Following are the book titles and the years they were published. \n 2012. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - A Gift of Love\n 2011. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Legacy Edition\n 2010. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Discovered With Great Bliss\n 2009. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - The Encouraging Branch\n 2008. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - The Crystal Heart\n 2007. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Sparkling Treasures\n 2006. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Beyond the Goddess Venus\n 2005. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Words of Love\n 2004. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Twelve Years of Love\n 2003. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - The Legendary Contest\n 2002. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 10th Anniversary of the Greatest Contest on Earth\n 2001. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - The Greatest Contest on Earth\n 2000. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - A Millennium Mother's Day Tribute\n 1999. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - Seventh Anniversary Edition\n 1998. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 1,500 Essay Winners for 1998\n 1997. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 1,002 Essay Winners for 1997\n 1996. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 732 Essay Winners for 1996\n 1995. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 391 Essay Winners for 1995\n 1994. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 1994 Essay Winners\n 1993. Why Mom Deserves a Diamond - 1993 Essay Winners\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n CBS News\n\nWriting contests\nRecurring events established in 1993\n1993 establishments in California"
] |
[
"Immanuel Kant",
"Biography"
] |
C_0c40c17950584bf09790550b98a1f802_1
|
where was he born?
| 1 |
Where was Immanuel Kant born?
|
Immanuel Kant
|
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg. (Her name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.) His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish; it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekule) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Kant was born into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in East Prussia. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained a belief in Christianity, in his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals he reveals a belief in human immortality as the necessary condition of our continued approach to the highest good possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of Theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -- he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigsberg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Konigsberg his whole life. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Gross-Arnsdorf (now Jarnoltowo near Morag (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). CANNOTANSWER
|
in Konigsberg, Prussia (
|
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him an influential figure in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses.
Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, and that perhaps this could be the culminating stage of world history. The nature of Kant's religious views continues to be the subject of scholarly dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he shifted from an early defense of an ontological argument for the existence of God to a principled agnosticism, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise", and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known papers, such as "On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy" and "On the Different Races of Man". Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history during his lifetime. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Critique of Judgment (1790), Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
Biography
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).
Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic, even though it has also been suggested that Kant intends other people to think of him as a "pure rationalist", who is defined by Kant himself as someone who recognizes revelation but asserts that to know and accept it as real is not a necessary requisite to religion.
Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).
Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–47).
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World). This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Critique of Pure Reason
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgei.e. reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjectiveessentially illusoryseries of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more."
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Later work
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Death and burial
Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut (It is good)" before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778).
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment.
Philosophy
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for
Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
the epistemology of transcendental idealism and
the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called "synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that, because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real", as did the German Idealists, another group arose who asked how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Epistemology
Theory of perception
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.
Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions:
Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."
Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone," or, "All bodies have weight."
An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred. Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless. Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind."
Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one."
Categories of the Faculty of Understanding
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction.
To begin with, Kant's distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of understanding.
For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.
To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.
One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear.
Transcendental schema doctrine
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect. In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance.
Ethics
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
In Groundwork, Kant tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose. Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.
Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. In the same book, Kant stated:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstancesbecause, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle.
Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf"), Appendix 1.
First formulation
The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature". This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"
One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps:
Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take, for example, the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Together, they form the maxim.
Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.
Decide if contradictions or irrationalities would arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
If a contradiction or irrationality would arise, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
Second formulation
The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".
Third formulation
The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".
In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success." The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God". Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Idea of freedom
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed" and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done". (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.)
Categories of freedom
In the Critique of Practical Reason, at the end of the second Main Part of the Analytics, Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Aesthetic philosophy
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori." After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant developed a theory of humor (§ 54) that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music. His knowledge of music, however, has been reported to be much weaker than his sense of humor: He told many more jokes throughout his lectures and writings.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Political philosophy
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational:
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
Anthropology
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Introduction to Kant's Anthropology was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself."
Racism
Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism, and some have claimed that he was one of the central figures in the birth of modern scientific racism. Where figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians.
Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."
Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite". He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites.
Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works. He wrote about Kant's ideas of race:
Pauline Kleingeld argues that while Kant was indeed a staunch advocate of scientific racism for much of his career, his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant unambiguously rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework. While Kant's perspective on the topic of European colonialism became more balanced, he still considered Europeans "civilized" to the exception of others:
Influence and legacy
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e. that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted in several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in postmodern philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
The human subject seen as the centre of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are for us;
The notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits to our ability to know entirely a priori;
The notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe . . . : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions;
The theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;
His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;
His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.
Historical influence
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German idealism developed from his writings. The German idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
The influential English Romantic poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German idealism generally, in the UK and the USA. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. The main accusations Hegel charged Kant's philosophy with were formalism (or "abstractism") and irrationality. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e human consciousness) apart from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction, that Hegel called the "absolute idealism". Similar concerns moved Hegel's criticisms to Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer...."
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.
Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Influence on modern thinkers
With his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates.
Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.
Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, but which he later criticised heavily and rejected. He held the view that "[I]f one does not want to assert that relativity theory goes against reason, one cannot retain the a priori concepts and norms of Kant's system". However, Kant scholar Stephen Palmquist has argued that Einstein's rejection of Kant's influence was primarily "a response to mistaken interpretations of Kant being adopted by contemporary philosophers", when in fact Kant's transcendental perspective informed Einstein's early worldview and led to his insights regarding simultaneity, and eventually to his proposal of the theory of relativity. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Film/television
Kant and his work was heavily referenced in the comedy television show The Good Place, as the show deals with the subject of ethics and moral philosophy.
Bibliography
List of major works
(1749) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
(March 1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
(April 1755) Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio (master's thesis under Johann Gottfried Teske))
(September 1755) A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (doctoral thesis))
(1756) The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology (Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophin naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam, abbreviated as Monadologia Physica (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))
(1762) The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
(1763) The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
(1763) Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
(1764) Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
(1764) Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
(1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers)
(1768) On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space (Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume)
(August 1770) Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (doctoral thesis))
(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
(1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?")
(1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht")
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1786) "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" ("Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?")
(1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte)
(1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
(1790) Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)
(1793) Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
(1793) On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
(1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden")
(1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten)
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
(1804) Opus Postumum
(1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K.H.L. Pölitz) [The English edition of A.W. Wood & G.M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.]
Collected works in German
Printed version
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9),
II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13),
III. Kant's literary remains, or Nachlass (vols. 14–23), and
IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29).
Electronic version
Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).
See also
Notes
References
Works cited
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Page numbers citing this work are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902–38).
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. .
Further reading
In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
General introductions to his thought
Broad, C.D. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1999.
Martin, Gottfried. Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Greenwood Press, 1955 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's System of Perspectives : an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
Seung, T.K. 2007. Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
Satyananda Giri. Kant. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001. (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)
Uleman, Jennifer. An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Luchte, James. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. The Athlone Press, 1983.
Biography and historical context
Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Harvard University Press, 2002
Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translation of Kants Leben und Lehre. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kanta study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).
Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
Johnson, G.R. (ed.). Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)
Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und –theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)
Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760–1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2000.
Schabert, Joseph A. "Kant's Influence on his Successors", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVII, January 1922.
Collections of essays
Firestone, Chris L. and Palmquist, Stephen (eds.). Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Förster, Eckart (ed.). Kant's Transcendental Deductions:. The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich.
Guyer, Paul (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought.
Mohanty, J.N. and Shahan, Robert W. (eds.). Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Phillips, Dewi et al. (eds.). Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.
Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.
Theoretical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised).
Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English).
Banham, Gary. Kant's Transcendental Imagination. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Greenberg, Robert. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. Penn State Press, 2001
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments).
Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy. Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards et al. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1930 (influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted).
Kitcher, Patricia. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998. . (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)
Melnick, Arthur. Kant's Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)
Paton, H.J. Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (extensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)
Pippin, Robert B. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie. F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy", )
Seung, T.K. Kant's Transcendental Logic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989 (the work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant).
Sturm, Thomas, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009. . review (Treats Kant's anthropology and his views on psychology and history in relation to his philosophy of science.)
Tonelli, Giorgio. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason within the Tradition of Modern Logic. A Commentary on its History. Hildesheim, Olms 1994
Werkmeister, W.H., Kant: The Architectonic and Development of His Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Ill.; 1980 (it treats, as a whole, the architectonic and development of Kant's philosophy from 1755 through the Opus postumum.)
Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review )
Practical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press 1990.
Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Dorschel, Andreas. Die idealistische Kritik des Willens: Versuch über die Theorie der praktischen Subjektivität bei Kant und Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 (Schriften zur Transzendentalphilosophie 10) .
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Michalson, Gordon E. Kant and the Problem of God. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy. University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.
Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
Seung, T.K. Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Johns Hopkins, 1994.
Wolff, Robert Paul. The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. .
Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Aesthetics
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Banham, Gary. Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Clewis, Robert. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. Wisconsin, 1974.
Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1979.
Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Immanuel Kant entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Kaplama, Erman. Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian. Lanham: UPA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Makkreel, Rudolf, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Chicago, 1990.
McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. SUNY, 1987.
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh, 1979.
Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso, 2000.
Philosophy of religion
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion : Volume Two of Kant's System of Perspectives. Ashgate, 2000.
Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales, v. 28, p. 91–103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)
Perpetual peace and international relations
Sir Harry Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and Mazzini ed. Gabriele Wight & Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Other works
Botul, Jean-Baptiste. La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. Paris, Éd. Mille et une Nuits, 2008.
Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties. Columbia University, 1980.
Kelly, Michael. Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, London: Swan Sonnenschein 1910. [Reprinted 2010 Nabu Press, ]
Mosser, Kurt. Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
White, Mark D. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character . Stanford University Press, 2011. . (Reviewed in The Montreal Review )
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence
Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
Hanna, Robert, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2004.
Hanna, Robert, Kant, Science, and Human Nature. Clarendon Press, 2006.
Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgement. Harvard University Press, 1993.
(A Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation.)
Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994. . (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)
Parfit, Derek. On What Matters (2 vols.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. Viking Press, 2007. . (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)
Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)
External links
KantPapers, authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University
Immanuel Kant at the Encyclopædia Britannica
Immanuel Kant in the Christian Cyclopedia
Works by Immanuel Kant at Duisburg-Essen University
Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology
Kant's Ethical Theory – Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated
Notes on Utilitarianism – A conveniently brief survey of Kant's Utilitarianism
"Immanuel Kant", An overview of his work, times, and influence on biology, plantspeopleplanet.org.au
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: An Overview
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Logic
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Mind
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Radical Evil
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Religion
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant
1724 births
1804 deaths
18th-century anthropologists
18th-century essayists
18th-century German male writers
18th-century German philosophers
18th-century German writers
18th-century non-fiction writers
18th-century Prussian people
19th-century anthropologists
19th-century essayists
19th-century German male writers
19th-century German non-fiction writers
19th-century German philosophers
19th-century German writers
19th-century Prussian people
19th-century social scientists
Age of Enlightenment
Continental philosophers
Cultural critics
Enlightenment philosophers
Epistemologists
Founders of philosophical traditions
German agnostics
German anthropologists
German classical liberals
German essayists
German ethicists
German idealism
German logicians
German Lutherans
German male non-fiction writers
German nationalists
German philosophers
German political philosophers
History of ethics
History of logic
History of philosophy
Humor researchers
Idealists
Intellectual history
Kantianism
Kantian philosophers
Lecturers
Logicians
Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
Metaphilosophers
Metaphysicians
Moral philosophers
Natural philosophers
Ontologists
People of the Age of Enlightenment
Philosophers of art
Philosophers of culture
Philosophers of education
Philosophers of ethics and morality
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of law
Philosophers of literature
Philosophers of logic
Philosophers of mind
Philosophers of religion
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of sexuality
Philosophers of social science
Philosophers of war
Philosophy writers
Political liberals (international relations)
Rationalists
Rationality theorists
Social critics
Social philosophers
Theorists on Western civilization
University of Königsberg alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about religion and science
| false |
[
"Miguel Skrobot (Warsaw, 1873 – Curitiba, February 20, 1912) was a businessman Brazilian of Polish origin.\n\nMiguel Skrobot was born in 1873, in Warsaw, Poland, to José Skrobot and Rosa Skrobot. When he was 18 he migrated to Brazil and settled in Curitiba as a merchant.\n\nHe married Maria Pansardi, who was born in Tibagi, Paraná, to Italian immigrants, and she bore him three children. He kept a steam-powered factory where he worked on grinding and toasting coffee beans under the \"Rio Branco\" brand, located on the spot where today stands the square called Praça Zacarias (square located in the center of Curitiba). He also owned a grocery store near Praça Tiradentes (also a square in the center of Curitiba, where the city was born). He died an early death, when he was 39, on February 20, 1912.\n\nReferences\n\n1873 births\n1912 deaths\nBrazilian businesspeople\nPeople from Curitiba\nPolish emigrants to Brazil",
"Adolf von Rauch (22 April 1798 - 12 December 1882) was a German paper manufacturer in Heilbronn, where he was born and died and where he was a major builder of social housing.\n\nPapermakers\n1798 births\n1882 deaths\nPeople from Heilbronn"
] |
[
"Immanuel Kant",
"Biography",
"where was he born?",
"in Konigsberg, Prussia ("
] |
C_0c40c17950584bf09790550b98a1f802_1
|
when was he born?
| 2 |
When was Immanuel Kant born?
|
Immanuel Kant
|
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg. (Her name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.) His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish; it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekule) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Kant was born into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in East Prussia. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained a belief in Christianity, in his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals he reveals a belief in human immortality as the necessary condition of our continued approach to the highest good possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of Theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -- he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigsberg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Konigsberg his whole life. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Gross-Arnsdorf (now Jarnoltowo near Morag (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). CANNOTANSWER
|
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724
|
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him an influential figure in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses.
Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, and that perhaps this could be the culminating stage of world history. The nature of Kant's religious views continues to be the subject of scholarly dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he shifted from an early defense of an ontological argument for the existence of God to a principled agnosticism, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise", and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known papers, such as "On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy" and "On the Different Races of Man". Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history during his lifetime. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Critique of Judgment (1790), Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
Biography
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).
Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic, even though it has also been suggested that Kant intends other people to think of him as a "pure rationalist", who is defined by Kant himself as someone who recognizes revelation but asserts that to know and accept it as real is not a necessary requisite to religion.
Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).
Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–47).
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World). This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Critique of Pure Reason
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgei.e. reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjectiveessentially illusoryseries of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more."
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Later work
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Death and burial
Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut (It is good)" before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778).
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment.
Philosophy
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for
Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
the epistemology of transcendental idealism and
the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called "synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that, because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real", as did the German Idealists, another group arose who asked how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Epistemology
Theory of perception
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.
Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions:
Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."
Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone," or, "All bodies have weight."
An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred. Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless. Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind."
Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one."
Categories of the Faculty of Understanding
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction.
To begin with, Kant's distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of understanding.
For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.
To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.
One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear.
Transcendental schema doctrine
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect. In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance.
Ethics
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
In Groundwork, Kant tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose. Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.
Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. In the same book, Kant stated:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstancesbecause, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle.
Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf"), Appendix 1.
First formulation
The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature". This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"
One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps:
Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take, for example, the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Together, they form the maxim.
Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.
Decide if contradictions or irrationalities would arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
If a contradiction or irrationality would arise, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
Second formulation
The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".
Third formulation
The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".
In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success." The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God". Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Idea of freedom
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed" and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done". (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.)
Categories of freedom
In the Critique of Practical Reason, at the end of the second Main Part of the Analytics, Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Aesthetic philosophy
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori." After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant developed a theory of humor (§ 54) that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music. His knowledge of music, however, has been reported to be much weaker than his sense of humor: He told many more jokes throughout his lectures and writings.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Political philosophy
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational:
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
Anthropology
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Introduction to Kant's Anthropology was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself."
Racism
Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism, and some have claimed that he was one of the central figures in the birth of modern scientific racism. Where figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians.
Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."
Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite". He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites.
Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works. He wrote about Kant's ideas of race:
Pauline Kleingeld argues that while Kant was indeed a staunch advocate of scientific racism for much of his career, his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant unambiguously rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework. While Kant's perspective on the topic of European colonialism became more balanced, he still considered Europeans "civilized" to the exception of others:
Influence and legacy
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e. that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted in several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in postmodern philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
The human subject seen as the centre of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are for us;
The notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits to our ability to know entirely a priori;
The notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe . . . : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions;
The theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;
His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;
His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.
Historical influence
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German idealism developed from his writings. The German idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
The influential English Romantic poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German idealism generally, in the UK and the USA. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. The main accusations Hegel charged Kant's philosophy with were formalism (or "abstractism") and irrationality. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e human consciousness) apart from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction, that Hegel called the "absolute idealism". Similar concerns moved Hegel's criticisms to Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer...."
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.
Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Influence on modern thinkers
With his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates.
Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.
Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, but which he later criticised heavily and rejected. He held the view that "[I]f one does not want to assert that relativity theory goes against reason, one cannot retain the a priori concepts and norms of Kant's system". However, Kant scholar Stephen Palmquist has argued that Einstein's rejection of Kant's influence was primarily "a response to mistaken interpretations of Kant being adopted by contemporary philosophers", when in fact Kant's transcendental perspective informed Einstein's early worldview and led to his insights regarding simultaneity, and eventually to his proposal of the theory of relativity. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Film/television
Kant and his work was heavily referenced in the comedy television show The Good Place, as the show deals with the subject of ethics and moral philosophy.
Bibliography
List of major works
(1749) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
(March 1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
(April 1755) Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio (master's thesis under Johann Gottfried Teske))
(September 1755) A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (doctoral thesis))
(1756) The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology (Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophin naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam, abbreviated as Monadologia Physica (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))
(1762) The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
(1763) The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
(1763) Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
(1764) Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
(1764) Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
(1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers)
(1768) On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space (Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume)
(August 1770) Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (doctoral thesis))
(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
(1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?")
(1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht")
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1786) "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" ("Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?")
(1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte)
(1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
(1790) Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)
(1793) Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
(1793) On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
(1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden")
(1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten)
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
(1804) Opus Postumum
(1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K.H.L. Pölitz) [The English edition of A.W. Wood & G.M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.]
Collected works in German
Printed version
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9),
II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13),
III. Kant's literary remains, or Nachlass (vols. 14–23), and
IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29).
Electronic version
Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).
See also
Notes
References
Works cited
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Page numbers citing this work are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902–38).
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. .
Further reading
In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
General introductions to his thought
Broad, C.D. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1999.
Martin, Gottfried. Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Greenwood Press, 1955 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's System of Perspectives : an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
Seung, T.K. 2007. Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
Satyananda Giri. Kant. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001. (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)
Uleman, Jennifer. An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Luchte, James. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. The Athlone Press, 1983.
Biography and historical context
Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Harvard University Press, 2002
Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translation of Kants Leben und Lehre. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kanta study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).
Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
Johnson, G.R. (ed.). Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)
Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und –theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)
Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760–1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2000.
Schabert, Joseph A. "Kant's Influence on his Successors", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVII, January 1922.
Collections of essays
Firestone, Chris L. and Palmquist, Stephen (eds.). Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Förster, Eckart (ed.). Kant's Transcendental Deductions:. The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich.
Guyer, Paul (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought.
Mohanty, J.N. and Shahan, Robert W. (eds.). Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Phillips, Dewi et al. (eds.). Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.
Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.
Theoretical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised).
Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English).
Banham, Gary. Kant's Transcendental Imagination. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Greenberg, Robert. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. Penn State Press, 2001
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments).
Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy. Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards et al. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1930 (influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted).
Kitcher, Patricia. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998. . (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)
Melnick, Arthur. Kant's Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)
Paton, H.J. Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (extensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)
Pippin, Robert B. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie. F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy", )
Seung, T.K. Kant's Transcendental Logic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989 (the work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant).
Sturm, Thomas, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009. . review (Treats Kant's anthropology and his views on psychology and history in relation to his philosophy of science.)
Tonelli, Giorgio. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason within the Tradition of Modern Logic. A Commentary on its History. Hildesheim, Olms 1994
Werkmeister, W.H., Kant: The Architectonic and Development of His Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Ill.; 1980 (it treats, as a whole, the architectonic and development of Kant's philosophy from 1755 through the Opus postumum.)
Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review )
Practical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press 1990.
Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Dorschel, Andreas. Die idealistische Kritik des Willens: Versuch über die Theorie der praktischen Subjektivität bei Kant und Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 (Schriften zur Transzendentalphilosophie 10) .
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Michalson, Gordon E. Kant and the Problem of God. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy. University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.
Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
Seung, T.K. Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Johns Hopkins, 1994.
Wolff, Robert Paul. The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. .
Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Aesthetics
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Banham, Gary. Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Clewis, Robert. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. Wisconsin, 1974.
Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1979.
Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Immanuel Kant entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Kaplama, Erman. Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian. Lanham: UPA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Makkreel, Rudolf, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Chicago, 1990.
McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. SUNY, 1987.
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh, 1979.
Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso, 2000.
Philosophy of religion
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion : Volume Two of Kant's System of Perspectives. Ashgate, 2000.
Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales, v. 28, p. 91–103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)
Perpetual peace and international relations
Sir Harry Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and Mazzini ed. Gabriele Wight & Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Other works
Botul, Jean-Baptiste. La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. Paris, Éd. Mille et une Nuits, 2008.
Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties. Columbia University, 1980.
Kelly, Michael. Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, London: Swan Sonnenschein 1910. [Reprinted 2010 Nabu Press, ]
Mosser, Kurt. Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
White, Mark D. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character . Stanford University Press, 2011. . (Reviewed in The Montreal Review )
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence
Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
Hanna, Robert, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2004.
Hanna, Robert, Kant, Science, and Human Nature. Clarendon Press, 2006.
Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgement. Harvard University Press, 1993.
(A Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation.)
Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994. . (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)
Parfit, Derek. On What Matters (2 vols.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. Viking Press, 2007. . (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)
Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)
External links
KantPapers, authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University
Immanuel Kant at the Encyclopædia Britannica
Immanuel Kant in the Christian Cyclopedia
Works by Immanuel Kant at Duisburg-Essen University
Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology
Kant's Ethical Theory – Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated
Notes on Utilitarianism – A conveniently brief survey of Kant's Utilitarianism
"Immanuel Kant", An overview of his work, times, and influence on biology, plantspeopleplanet.org.au
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: An Overview
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Logic
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Mind
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Radical Evil
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Religion
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant
1724 births
1804 deaths
18th-century anthropologists
18th-century essayists
18th-century German male writers
18th-century German philosophers
18th-century German writers
18th-century non-fiction writers
18th-century Prussian people
19th-century anthropologists
19th-century essayists
19th-century German male writers
19th-century German non-fiction writers
19th-century German philosophers
19th-century German writers
19th-century Prussian people
19th-century social scientists
Age of Enlightenment
Continental philosophers
Cultural critics
Enlightenment philosophers
Epistemologists
Founders of philosophical traditions
German agnostics
German anthropologists
German classical liberals
German essayists
German ethicists
German idealism
German logicians
German Lutherans
German male non-fiction writers
German nationalists
German philosophers
German political philosophers
History of ethics
History of logic
History of philosophy
Humor researchers
Idealists
Intellectual history
Kantianism
Kantian philosophers
Lecturers
Logicians
Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
Metaphilosophers
Metaphysicians
Moral philosophers
Natural philosophers
Ontologists
People of the Age of Enlightenment
Philosophers of art
Philosophers of culture
Philosophers of education
Philosophers of ethics and morality
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of law
Philosophers of literature
Philosophers of logic
Philosophers of mind
Philosophers of religion
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of sexuality
Philosophers of social science
Philosophers of war
Philosophy writers
Political liberals (international relations)
Rationalists
Rationality theorists
Social critics
Social philosophers
Theorists on Western civilization
University of Königsberg alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about religion and science
| false |
[
"Since the first human spaceflight by the Soviet Union, citizens of 42 countries have flown in space. For each nationality, the launch date of the first mission is listed. The list is based on the nationality of the person at the time of the launch. Only 3 of the 42 \"first flyers\" have been women (Helen Sharman for the United Kingdom in 1991, Anousheh Ansari for Iran in 2006, and Yi So-yeon for South Korea in 2008). Only three nations (Soviet Union/Russia, U.S., China) have launched their own crewed spacecraft, with the Soviets/Russians and the American programs providing rides to other nations' astronauts. Twenty-seven \"first flights\" occurred on Soviet or Russian flights while the United States carried fourteen.\n\nTimeline\nNote: All dates given are UTC. Countries indicated in bold have achieved independent human spaceflight capability.\n\nNotes\n\nOther claims\nThe above list uses the nationality at the time of launch. Lists with differing criteria might include the following people:\n Pavel Popovich, first launched 12 August 1962, was the first Ukrainian-born man in space. At the time, Ukraine was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\n Michael Collins, first launched 18 July 1966 was born in Italy to American parents and was an American citizen when he went into space.\n William Anders, American citizen, first launched 21 December 1968, was the first Hong Kong-born man in space.\n Vladimir Shatalov, first launched 14 January 1969, was the first Kazakh-born man in space. At the time, Kazakhstan was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\n Bill Pogue, first launched 16 November 1973, as an inductee to the 5 Civilized Tribes Hall of Fame can lay claim to being the first Native American in space. See John Herrington below regarding technicality of tribal registration.\n Pyotr Klimuk, first launched 18 December 1973, was the first Belorussian-born man in space. At the time, Belarus was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\n Vladimir Dzhanibekov, first launched 16 March 1978, was the first Uzbek-born man in space. At the time, Uzbekistan was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\n Paul D. Scully-Power, first launched 5 October 1984, was born in Australia, but was an American citizen when he went into space; Australian law at the time forbade dual-citizenship.\n Taylor Gun-Jin Wang, first launched 29 April 1985, was born in China to Chinese parents, but was an American citizen when he went into space.\n Lodewijk van den Berg, launched 29 April 1985, was born in the Netherlands, but was an American citizen when he went into space.\n Patrick Baudry, first launched 17 June 1985, was born in French Cameroun (now part of Cameroon), but was a French citizen when he went into space.\n Shannon Lucid, first launched 17 June 1985, was born in China to American parents of European descent, and was an American citizen when she went into space.\n Franklin Chang-Diaz, first launched 12 January 1986, was born in Costa Rica, but was an American citizen when he went into space\n Musa Manarov, first launched 21 December 1987, was the first Azerbaijan-born man in space. At the time, Azerbaijan was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\n Anatoly Solovyev, first launched 7 June 1988, was the first Latvian-born man in space. At the time, Latvia was a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.\n Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Volkov became Russian rather than Soviet citizens while still in orbit aboard Mir, making them the first purely Russian citizens in space.\n James H. Newman, American citizen, first launched 12 September 1993, was born in the portion of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands that is now the Federated States of Micronesia.\n Talgat Musabayev, first launched 1 July 1994, was born in the Kazakh SSR and is known in Kazakhstan as the \"first cosmonaut of independent Kazakhstan\", but was a Russian citizen when he went into space.\n Frederick W. Leslie, American citizen, launched 20 October 1995, was born in Panama Canal Zone (now Panama).\n Andy Thomas, first launched 19 May 1996, was born in Australia but like Paul D. Scully-Power was an American citizen when he went to space; Australian law at the time forbade dual-citizenship.\n Carlos I. Noriega, first launched 15 May 1997, was born in Peru, but was an American citizen when he went into space.\n Bjarni Tryggvason, launched 7 August 1997, was born in Iceland, but was a Canadian citizen when he went into space.\n Salizhan Sharipov, first launched 22 January 1998, was born in Kyrgyzstan (then the Kirghiz SSR), but was a Russian citizen when he went into space. Sharipov is of Uzbek ancestry.\n Philippe Perrin, first launched 5 June 2002, was born in Morocco, but was a French citizen when he went into space.\n John Herrington, an American citizen first launched 24 November 2002, is the first tribal registered Native American in space (Chickasaw). See also Bill Pogue above.\n Fyodor Yurchikhin, first launched 7 October 2002, was born in Georgia (then the Georgian SSR). He was a Russian citizen at the time he went into space and is of Pontian Greek descent.\n Joseph M. Acaba, first launched 15 March 2009, was born in the U.S. state of California to American parents of Puerto Rican descent.\n\nGallery\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nCurrent Space Demographics, compiled by William Harwood, CBS News Space Consultant, and Rob Navias, NASA.\n\nLists of firsts in space\nSpaceflight timelines",
"This is a list of notable books by young authors and of books written by notable writers in their early years. These books were written, or substantially completed, before the author's twentieth birthday. \n\nAlexandra Adornetto (born 18 April 1994) wrote her debut novel, The Shadow Thief, when she was 13. It was published in 2007. Other books written by her as a teenager are: The Lampo Circus (2008), Von Gobstopper's Arcade (2009), Halo (2010) and Hades (2011).\nMargery Allingham (1904–1966) had her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, about smugglers in 17th century Essex, published in 1923, when she was 19.\nJorge Amado (1912–2001) had his debut novel, The Country of Carnival, published in 1931, when he was 18.\nPrateek Arora wrote his debut novel Village 1104 at the age of 16. It was published in 2010.\nDaisy Ashford (1881–1972) wrote The Young Visiters while aged nine. This novella was first published in 1919, preserving her juvenile punctuation and spelling. An earlier work, The Life of Father McSwiney, was dictated to her father when she was four. It was published almost a century later in 1983.\nAmelia Atwater-Rhodes (born 1984) had her first novel, In the Forests of the Night, published in 1999. Subsequent novels include Demon in My View (2000), Shattered Mirror (2001), Midnight Predator (2002), Hawksong (2003) and Snakecharm (2004).\nJane Austen (1775–1817) wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, between 1793 and 1795 when she was aged 18-20.\nRuskin Bond (born 1934) wrote his semi-autobiographical novel The Room on the Roof when he was 17. It was published in 1955.\nMarjorie Bowen (1885–1952) wrote the historical novel The Viper of Milan when she was 16. Published in 1906 after several rejections, it became a bestseller.\nOliver Madox Brown (1855–1874) finished his novel Gabriel Denver in early 1872, when he was 17. It was published the following year.\nPamela Brown (1924–1989) finished her children's novel about an amateur theatre company, The Swish of the Curtain (1941), when she was 16 and later wrote other books about the stage.\nCeleste and Carmel Buckingham wrote The Lost Princess when they were 11 and 9.\nFlavia Bujor (born 8 August 1988) wrote The Prophecy of the Stones (2002) when she was 13.\nLord Byron (1788–1824) published two volumes of poetry in his teens, Fugitive Pieces and Hours of Idleness.\nTaylor Caldwell's The Romance of Atlantis was written when she was 12.\n (1956–1976), Le Don de Vorace, was published in 1974.\nHilda Conkling (1910–1986) had her poems published in Poems by a Little Girl (1920), Shoes of the Wind (1922) and Silverhorn (1924).\nAbraham Cowley (1618–1667), Tragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe (1628), Poetical Blossoms (published 1633).\nMaureen Daly (1921–2006) completed Seventeenth Summer before she was 20. It was published in 1942.\nJuliette Davies (born 2000) wrote the first book in the JJ Halo series when she was eight years old. The series was published the following year.\nSamuel R. Delany (born 1 April 1942) published his The Jewels of Aptor in 1962.\nPatricia Finney's A Shadow of Gulls was published in 1977 when she was 18. Its sequel, The Crow Goddess, was published in 1978.\nBarbara Newhall Follett (1914–1939) wrote her first novel The House Without Windows at the age of eight. The manuscript was destroyed in a house fire and she later retyped her manuscript at the age of 12. The novel was published by Knopf publishing house in January 1927.\nFord Madox Ford (né Hueffer) (1873–1939) published in 1892 two children's stories, The Brown Owl and The Feather, and a novel, The Shifting of the Fire.\nAnne Frank (1929–1945) wrote her diary for two-and-a-half years starting on her 13th birthday. It was published posthumously as Het Achterhuis in 1947 and then in English translation in 1952 as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. An unabridged translation followed in 1996.\nMiles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career (1901) when she was a teenager.\nAlec Greven's How to Talk to Girls was published in 2008 when he was nine years old. Subsequently he has published How to Talk to Moms, How to Talk to Dads and How to Talk to Santa.\nFaïza Guène (born 1985) had Kiffe kiffe demain published in 2004, when she was 19. It has since been translated into 22 languages, including English (as Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow).\nSonya Hartnett (born 1968) was thirteen years old when she wrote her first novel, Trouble All the Way, which was published in Australia in 1984.\nAlex and Brett Harris wrote the best-selling book Do Hard Things (2008), a non-fiction book challenging teenagers to \"rebel against low expectations\", at age 19. Two years later came a follow-up book called Start Here (2010).\nGeorgette Heyer (1902–1974) wrote The Black Moth when she was 17 and received a publishing contract when she was 18. It was published just after she turned 19.\nSusan Hill (born 1942), The Enclosure, published in 1961.\nS. E. Hinton (born 1948), The Outsiders, first published in 1967.\nPalle Huld (1912–2010) wrote A Boy Scout Around the World (Jorden Rundt i 44 dage) when he was 15, following a sponsored journey around the world.\nGeorge Vernon Hudson (1867–1946) completed An Elementary Manual of New Zealand Entomology at the end of 1886, when he was 19, but not published until 1892.\nKatharine Hull (1921–1977) and Pamela Whitlock (1920–1982) wrote the children's outdoor adventure novel The Far-Distant Oxus in 1937. It was followed in 1938 by Escape to Persia and in 1939 by Oxus in Summer.\nLeigh Hunt (1784–1859) published Juvenilia; or, a Collection of Poems Written between the ages of Twelve and Sixteen by J. H. L. Hunt, Late of the Grammar School of Christ's Hospital in March 1801.\nKody Keplinger (born 1991) wrote her debut novel The DUFF when she was 17.\nGordon Korman (born 1963), This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall (1978), three sequels, and I Want to Go Home (1981).\nMatthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818) wrote the Gothic novel The Monk, now regarded as a classic of the genre, before he was twenty. It was published in 1796.\nNina Lugovskaya (1918–1993), a painter, theater director and Gulag survivor, kept a diary in 1932–37, which shows strong social sensitivities. It was found in the Russian State Archives and published 2003. It appeared in English in the same year.\nJoyce Maynard (born 1953) completed Looking Back while she was 19. It was first published in 1973.\nMargaret Mitchell (1900–1949) wrote her novella Lost Laysen at the age of fifteen and gave the two notebooks containing the manuscript to her boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. The novel was published posthumously in 1996.\nBen Okri, the Nigerian poet and novelist, (born 1959) wrote his first book Flowers and Shadows while he was 19.\nAlice Oseman(born 1994) wrote the novel Solitaire when she was 17 and it was published in 2014.\nHelen Oyeyemi (born 1984) completed The Icarus Girl while still 18. First published in 2005.\nChristopher Paolini (born 1983) had Eragon, the first novel of the Inheritance Cycle, first published 2002.\nEmily Pepys (1833–1877), daughter of a bishop, wrote a vivid private journal over six months of 1844–45, aged ten. It was discovered much later and published in 1984.\nAnya Reiss (born 1991) wrote her play Spur of the Moment when she was 17. It was both performed and published in 2010, when she was 18.\nArthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) wrote almost all his prose and poetry while still a teenager, for example Le Soleil était encore chaud (1866), Le Bateau ivre (1871) and Une Saison en Enfer (1873).\nJohn Thomas Romney Robinson (1792–1882) saw his juvenile poems published in 1806, when he was 13.\nFrançoise Sagan (1935–2004) had Bonjour tristesse published in 1954, when she was 18.\nMary Shelley (1797–1851) completed Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus during May 1817, when she was 19. It was first published in the following year.\nMattie Stepanek (1990–2004), an American poet, published seven best-selling books of poetry.\nJohn Steptoe (1950–1989), author and illustrator, began his picture book Stevie at 16. It was published in 1969 in Life.\nAnna Stothard (born 1983) saw her Isabel and Rocco published when she was 19.\nDorothy Straight (born 1958) in 1962 wrote How the World Began, which was published by Pantheon Books in 1964. She holds the Guinness world record for the youngest female published author.\nJalaluddin Al-Suyuti (c. 1445–1505) wrote his first book, Sharh Al-Isti'aadha wal-Basmalah, at the age of 17.\nF. J. Thwaites (1908–1979) wrote his bestselling novel The Broken Melody when he was 19.\nJohn Kennedy Toole (1937–1969) wrote The Neon Bible in 1954 when he was 16. It was not published until 1989.\nAlec Waugh (1898–1981) wrote his novel about school life, The Loom of Youth, after leaving school. It was published in 1917.\nCatherine Webb (born 1986) had five young adult books published before she was 20: Mirror Dreams (2002), Mirror Wakes (2003), Waywalkers (2003), Timekeepers (2004) and The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle (February 2006).\nNancy Yi Fan (born 1993) published her debut Swordbird when she was 12. Other books she published as a teenager include Sword Quest (2008) and Sword Mountain (2012).\nKat Zhang (born 1991) was 20 when she sold, in a three-book deal, her entire Hybrid Chronicles trilogy. The first book, What's Left of Me, was published 2012.\n\nSee also \nLists of books\n\nReferences \n\nBooks Written By Children and Teenagers\nbooks\nChildren And Teenagers, Written By\nChi"
] |
[
"Immanuel Kant",
"Biography",
"where was he born?",
"in Konigsberg, Prussia (",
"when was he born?",
"Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724"
] |
C_0c40c17950584bf09790550b98a1f802_1
|
who were his parents?
| 3 |
Who were Immanuel Kant's parents?
|
Immanuel Kant
|
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg. (Her name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.) His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish; it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekule) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Kant was born into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in East Prussia. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained a belief in Christianity, in his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals he reveals a belief in human immortality as the necessary condition of our continued approach to the highest good possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of Theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -- he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigsberg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Konigsberg his whole life. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Gross-Arnsdorf (now Jarnoltowo near Morag (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). CANNOTANSWER
|
His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg.
|
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him an influential figure in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses.
Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, and that perhaps this could be the culminating stage of world history. The nature of Kant's religious views continues to be the subject of scholarly dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he shifted from an early defense of an ontological argument for the existence of God to a principled agnosticism, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise", and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known papers, such as "On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy" and "On the Different Races of Man". Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history during his lifetime. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Critique of Judgment (1790), Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
Biography
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).
Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic, even though it has also been suggested that Kant intends other people to think of him as a "pure rationalist", who is defined by Kant himself as someone who recognizes revelation but asserts that to know and accept it as real is not a necessary requisite to religion.
Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).
Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–47).
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World). This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Critique of Pure Reason
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgei.e. reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjectiveessentially illusoryseries of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more."
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Later work
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Death and burial
Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut (It is good)" before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778).
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment.
Philosophy
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for
Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
the epistemology of transcendental idealism and
the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called "synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that, because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real", as did the German Idealists, another group arose who asked how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Epistemology
Theory of perception
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.
Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions:
Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."
Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone," or, "All bodies have weight."
An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred. Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless. Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind."
Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one."
Categories of the Faculty of Understanding
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction.
To begin with, Kant's distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of understanding.
For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.
To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.
One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear.
Transcendental schema doctrine
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect. In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance.
Ethics
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
In Groundwork, Kant tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose. Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.
Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. In the same book, Kant stated:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstancesbecause, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle.
Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf"), Appendix 1.
First formulation
The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature". This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"
One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps:
Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take, for example, the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Together, they form the maxim.
Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.
Decide if contradictions or irrationalities would arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
If a contradiction or irrationality would arise, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
Second formulation
The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".
Third formulation
The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".
In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success." The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God". Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Idea of freedom
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed" and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done". (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.)
Categories of freedom
In the Critique of Practical Reason, at the end of the second Main Part of the Analytics, Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Aesthetic philosophy
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori." After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant developed a theory of humor (§ 54) that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music. His knowledge of music, however, has been reported to be much weaker than his sense of humor: He told many more jokes throughout his lectures and writings.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Political philosophy
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational:
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
Anthropology
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Introduction to Kant's Anthropology was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself."
Racism
Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism, and some have claimed that he was one of the central figures in the birth of modern scientific racism. Where figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians.
Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."
Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite". He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites.
Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works. He wrote about Kant's ideas of race:
Pauline Kleingeld argues that while Kant was indeed a staunch advocate of scientific racism for much of his career, his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant unambiguously rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework. While Kant's perspective on the topic of European colonialism became more balanced, he still considered Europeans "civilized" to the exception of others:
Influence and legacy
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e. that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted in several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in postmodern philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
The human subject seen as the centre of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are for us;
The notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits to our ability to know entirely a priori;
The notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe . . . : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions;
The theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;
His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;
His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.
Historical influence
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German idealism developed from his writings. The German idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
The influential English Romantic poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German idealism generally, in the UK and the USA. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. The main accusations Hegel charged Kant's philosophy with were formalism (or "abstractism") and irrationality. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e human consciousness) apart from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction, that Hegel called the "absolute idealism". Similar concerns moved Hegel's criticisms to Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer...."
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.
Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Influence on modern thinkers
With his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates.
Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.
Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, but which he later criticised heavily and rejected. He held the view that "[I]f one does not want to assert that relativity theory goes against reason, one cannot retain the a priori concepts and norms of Kant's system". However, Kant scholar Stephen Palmquist has argued that Einstein's rejection of Kant's influence was primarily "a response to mistaken interpretations of Kant being adopted by contemporary philosophers", when in fact Kant's transcendental perspective informed Einstein's early worldview and led to his insights regarding simultaneity, and eventually to his proposal of the theory of relativity. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Film/television
Kant and his work was heavily referenced in the comedy television show The Good Place, as the show deals with the subject of ethics and moral philosophy.
Bibliography
List of major works
(1749) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
(March 1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
(April 1755) Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio (master's thesis under Johann Gottfried Teske))
(September 1755) A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (doctoral thesis))
(1756) The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology (Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophin naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam, abbreviated as Monadologia Physica (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))
(1762) The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
(1763) The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
(1763) Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
(1764) Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
(1764) Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
(1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers)
(1768) On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space (Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume)
(August 1770) Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (doctoral thesis))
(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
(1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?")
(1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht")
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1786) "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" ("Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?")
(1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte)
(1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
(1790) Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)
(1793) Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
(1793) On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
(1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden")
(1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten)
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
(1804) Opus Postumum
(1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K.H.L. Pölitz) [The English edition of A.W. Wood & G.M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.]
Collected works in German
Printed version
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9),
II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13),
III. Kant's literary remains, or Nachlass (vols. 14–23), and
IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29).
Electronic version
Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).
See also
Notes
References
Works cited
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Page numbers citing this work are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902–38).
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. .
Further reading
In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
General introductions to his thought
Broad, C.D. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1999.
Martin, Gottfried. Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Greenwood Press, 1955 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's System of Perspectives : an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
Seung, T.K. 2007. Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
Satyananda Giri. Kant. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001. (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)
Uleman, Jennifer. An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Luchte, James. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. The Athlone Press, 1983.
Biography and historical context
Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Harvard University Press, 2002
Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translation of Kants Leben und Lehre. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kanta study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).
Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
Johnson, G.R. (ed.). Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)
Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und –theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)
Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760–1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2000.
Schabert, Joseph A. "Kant's Influence on his Successors", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVII, January 1922.
Collections of essays
Firestone, Chris L. and Palmquist, Stephen (eds.). Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Förster, Eckart (ed.). Kant's Transcendental Deductions:. The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich.
Guyer, Paul (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought.
Mohanty, J.N. and Shahan, Robert W. (eds.). Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Phillips, Dewi et al. (eds.). Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.
Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.
Theoretical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised).
Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English).
Banham, Gary. Kant's Transcendental Imagination. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Greenberg, Robert. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. Penn State Press, 2001
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments).
Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy. Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards et al. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1930 (influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted).
Kitcher, Patricia. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998. . (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)
Melnick, Arthur. Kant's Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)
Paton, H.J. Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (extensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)
Pippin, Robert B. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie. F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy", )
Seung, T.K. Kant's Transcendental Logic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989 (the work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant).
Sturm, Thomas, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009. . review (Treats Kant's anthropology and his views on psychology and history in relation to his philosophy of science.)
Tonelli, Giorgio. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason within the Tradition of Modern Logic. A Commentary on its History. Hildesheim, Olms 1994
Werkmeister, W.H., Kant: The Architectonic and Development of His Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Ill.; 1980 (it treats, as a whole, the architectonic and development of Kant's philosophy from 1755 through the Opus postumum.)
Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review )
Practical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press 1990.
Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Dorschel, Andreas. Die idealistische Kritik des Willens: Versuch über die Theorie der praktischen Subjektivität bei Kant und Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 (Schriften zur Transzendentalphilosophie 10) .
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Michalson, Gordon E. Kant and the Problem of God. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy. University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.
Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
Seung, T.K. Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Johns Hopkins, 1994.
Wolff, Robert Paul. The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. .
Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Aesthetics
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Banham, Gary. Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Clewis, Robert. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. Wisconsin, 1974.
Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1979.
Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Immanuel Kant entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Kaplama, Erman. Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian. Lanham: UPA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Makkreel, Rudolf, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Chicago, 1990.
McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. SUNY, 1987.
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh, 1979.
Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso, 2000.
Philosophy of religion
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion : Volume Two of Kant's System of Perspectives. Ashgate, 2000.
Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales, v. 28, p. 91–103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)
Perpetual peace and international relations
Sir Harry Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and Mazzini ed. Gabriele Wight & Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Other works
Botul, Jean-Baptiste. La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. Paris, Éd. Mille et une Nuits, 2008.
Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties. Columbia University, 1980.
Kelly, Michael. Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, London: Swan Sonnenschein 1910. [Reprinted 2010 Nabu Press, ]
Mosser, Kurt. Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
White, Mark D. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character . Stanford University Press, 2011. . (Reviewed in The Montreal Review )
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence
Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
Hanna, Robert, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2004.
Hanna, Robert, Kant, Science, and Human Nature. Clarendon Press, 2006.
Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgement. Harvard University Press, 1993.
(A Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation.)
Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994. . (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)
Parfit, Derek. On What Matters (2 vols.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. Viking Press, 2007. . (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)
Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)
External links
KantPapers, authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University
Immanuel Kant at the Encyclopædia Britannica
Immanuel Kant in the Christian Cyclopedia
Works by Immanuel Kant at Duisburg-Essen University
Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology
Kant's Ethical Theory – Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated
Notes on Utilitarianism – A conveniently brief survey of Kant's Utilitarianism
"Immanuel Kant", An overview of his work, times, and influence on biology, plantspeopleplanet.org.au
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: An Overview
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Logic
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Mind
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Radical Evil
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Religion
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant
1724 births
1804 deaths
18th-century anthropologists
18th-century essayists
18th-century German male writers
18th-century German philosophers
18th-century German writers
18th-century non-fiction writers
18th-century Prussian people
19th-century anthropologists
19th-century essayists
19th-century German male writers
19th-century German non-fiction writers
19th-century German philosophers
19th-century German writers
19th-century Prussian people
19th-century social scientists
Age of Enlightenment
Continental philosophers
Cultural critics
Enlightenment philosophers
Epistemologists
Founders of philosophical traditions
German agnostics
German anthropologists
German classical liberals
German essayists
German ethicists
German idealism
German logicians
German Lutherans
German male non-fiction writers
German nationalists
German philosophers
German political philosophers
History of ethics
History of logic
History of philosophy
Humor researchers
Idealists
Intellectual history
Kantianism
Kantian philosophers
Lecturers
Logicians
Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
Metaphilosophers
Metaphysicians
Moral philosophers
Natural philosophers
Ontologists
People of the Age of Enlightenment
Philosophers of art
Philosophers of culture
Philosophers of education
Philosophers of ethics and morality
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of law
Philosophers of literature
Philosophers of logic
Philosophers of mind
Philosophers of religion
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of sexuality
Philosophers of social science
Philosophers of war
Philosophy writers
Political liberals (international relations)
Rationalists
Rationality theorists
Social critics
Social philosophers
Theorists on Western civilization
University of Königsberg alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about religion and science
| false |
[
"The Extraordinary Tale of Nicholas Pierce is a 2011 adventure novel written by Alexander DeLuca. It follows the journey of a university teacher Nicholas Pierce, who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder as he searches for his biological parents, traveling across states in the United States of America. He travels with a friend, who is an eccentric barista in a cafe in upstate New York, named Sergei Tarasov.\n\nPlot\nNicholas Pierce suffers from OCD. He is also missing the memory of the first five years of his life. Raised by adoptive parents, one day he receives a mysterious box from an \"Uncle Nathan\". Curious, he sets off on a journey to find his biological parents with a Russian friend, Sergei Tarasov. On the trip, they meet several people, face money problems and different challenges. They also pick up a hitchhiker, Jessica, who later turns out to be a criminal.\n\nFinally, Nicholas finds his grandparents, who direct him to his biological parents. When he meets them, he finds out that his vaguely registered biological 'parents' were actually neighbors of his real parents who had died in an accident. The mysterious box that he had received is destroyed. He finds out that it contained photographs from his early life.\n\n2011 American novels\nNovels about obsessive–compulsive disorder",
"Bomba and the Jungle Girl is a 1952 adventure film directed by Ford Beebe and starring Johnny Sheffield. It is the eighth film (of 12) in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy film series.\n\nPlot\nBomba decides to find out who his parents were. He starts with Cody Casson's diary and follows the trail to a native village. An ancient blind woman tells him his parents, along the village's true ruler, were murdered by the current chieftain and his daughter. With the aid of an inspector and his daughter, Bomba battles the usurpers in the cave where his parents were buried.\n\nCast\nJohnny Sheffield\nKaren Sharpe\nWalter Sande\nSuzette Harbin\nMartin Wilkins\nMorris Buchanan\nLeonard Mudie\nDon Blackman.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1952 films\nAmerican films\nAmerican adventure films\nFilms directed by Ford Beebe\nFilms produced by Walter Mirisch\nMonogram Pictures films\n1952 adventure films\nAmerican black-and-white films"
] |
[
"Immanuel Kant",
"Biography",
"where was he born?",
"in Konigsberg, Prussia (",
"when was he born?",
"Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724",
"who were his parents?",
"His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg."
] |
C_0c40c17950584bf09790550b98a1f802_1
|
did he have any siblings?
| 4 |
Did Immanuel Kant have any siblings?
|
Immanuel Kant
|
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg. (Her name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.) His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish; it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekule) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Kant was born into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in East Prussia. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained a belief in Christianity, in his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals he reveals a belief in human immortality as the necessary condition of our continued approach to the highest good possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of Theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -- he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigsberg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Konigsberg his whole life. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Gross-Arnsdorf (now Jarnoltowo near Morag (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). CANNOTANSWER
|
Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood).
|
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him an influential figure in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses.
Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, and that perhaps this could be the culminating stage of world history. The nature of Kant's religious views continues to be the subject of scholarly dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he shifted from an early defense of an ontological argument for the existence of God to a principled agnosticism, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise", and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known papers, such as "On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy" and "On the Different Races of Man". Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history during his lifetime. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Critique of Judgment (1790), Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
Biography
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).
Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic, even though it has also been suggested that Kant intends other people to think of him as a "pure rationalist", who is defined by Kant himself as someone who recognizes revelation but asserts that to know and accept it as real is not a necessary requisite to religion.
Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).
Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–47).
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World). This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Critique of Pure Reason
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgei.e. reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjectiveessentially illusoryseries of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more."
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Later work
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Death and burial
Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut (It is good)" before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778).
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment.
Philosophy
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for
Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
the epistemology of transcendental idealism and
the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called "synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that, because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real", as did the German Idealists, another group arose who asked how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Epistemology
Theory of perception
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.
Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions:
Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."
Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone," or, "All bodies have weight."
An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred. Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless. Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind."
Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one."
Categories of the Faculty of Understanding
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction.
To begin with, Kant's distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of understanding.
For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.
To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.
One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear.
Transcendental schema doctrine
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect. In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance.
Ethics
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
In Groundwork, Kant tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose. Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.
Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. In the same book, Kant stated:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstancesbecause, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle.
Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf"), Appendix 1.
First formulation
The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature". This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"
One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps:
Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take, for example, the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Together, they form the maxim.
Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.
Decide if contradictions or irrationalities would arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
If a contradiction or irrationality would arise, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
Second formulation
The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".
Third formulation
The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".
In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success." The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God". Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Idea of freedom
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed" and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done". (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.)
Categories of freedom
In the Critique of Practical Reason, at the end of the second Main Part of the Analytics, Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Aesthetic philosophy
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori." After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant developed a theory of humor (§ 54) that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music. His knowledge of music, however, has been reported to be much weaker than his sense of humor: He told many more jokes throughout his lectures and writings.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Political philosophy
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational:
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
Anthropology
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Introduction to Kant's Anthropology was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself."
Racism
Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism, and some have claimed that he was one of the central figures in the birth of modern scientific racism. Where figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians.
Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."
Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite". He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites.
Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works. He wrote about Kant's ideas of race:
Pauline Kleingeld argues that while Kant was indeed a staunch advocate of scientific racism for much of his career, his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant unambiguously rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework. While Kant's perspective on the topic of European colonialism became more balanced, he still considered Europeans "civilized" to the exception of others:
Influence and legacy
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e. that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted in several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in postmodern philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
The human subject seen as the centre of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are for us;
The notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits to our ability to know entirely a priori;
The notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe . . . : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions;
The theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;
His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;
His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.
Historical influence
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German idealism developed from his writings. The German idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
The influential English Romantic poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German idealism generally, in the UK and the USA. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. The main accusations Hegel charged Kant's philosophy with were formalism (or "abstractism") and irrationality. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e human consciousness) apart from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction, that Hegel called the "absolute idealism". Similar concerns moved Hegel's criticisms to Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer...."
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.
Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Influence on modern thinkers
With his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates.
Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.
Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, but which he later criticised heavily and rejected. He held the view that "[I]f one does not want to assert that relativity theory goes against reason, one cannot retain the a priori concepts and norms of Kant's system". However, Kant scholar Stephen Palmquist has argued that Einstein's rejection of Kant's influence was primarily "a response to mistaken interpretations of Kant being adopted by contemporary philosophers", when in fact Kant's transcendental perspective informed Einstein's early worldview and led to his insights regarding simultaneity, and eventually to his proposal of the theory of relativity. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Film/television
Kant and his work was heavily referenced in the comedy television show The Good Place, as the show deals with the subject of ethics and moral philosophy.
Bibliography
List of major works
(1749) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
(March 1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
(April 1755) Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio (master's thesis under Johann Gottfried Teske))
(September 1755) A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (doctoral thesis))
(1756) The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology (Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophin naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam, abbreviated as Monadologia Physica (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))
(1762) The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
(1763) The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
(1763) Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
(1764) Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
(1764) Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
(1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers)
(1768) On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space (Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume)
(August 1770) Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (doctoral thesis))
(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
(1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?")
(1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht")
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1786) "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" ("Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?")
(1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte)
(1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
(1790) Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)
(1793) Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
(1793) On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
(1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden")
(1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten)
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
(1804) Opus Postumum
(1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K.H.L. Pölitz) [The English edition of A.W. Wood & G.M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.]
Collected works in German
Printed version
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9),
II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13),
III. Kant's literary remains, or Nachlass (vols. 14–23), and
IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29).
Electronic version
Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).
See also
Notes
References
Works cited
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Page numbers citing this work are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902–38).
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. .
Further reading
In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
General introductions to his thought
Broad, C.D. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1999.
Martin, Gottfried. Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Greenwood Press, 1955 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's System of Perspectives : an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
Seung, T.K. 2007. Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
Satyananda Giri. Kant. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001. (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)
Uleman, Jennifer. An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Luchte, James. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. The Athlone Press, 1983.
Biography and historical context
Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Harvard University Press, 2002
Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translation of Kants Leben und Lehre. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kanta study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).
Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
Johnson, G.R. (ed.). Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)
Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und –theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)
Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760–1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2000.
Schabert, Joseph A. "Kant's Influence on his Successors", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVII, January 1922.
Collections of essays
Firestone, Chris L. and Palmquist, Stephen (eds.). Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Förster, Eckart (ed.). Kant's Transcendental Deductions:. The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich.
Guyer, Paul (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought.
Mohanty, J.N. and Shahan, Robert W. (eds.). Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Phillips, Dewi et al. (eds.). Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.
Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.
Theoretical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised).
Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English).
Banham, Gary. Kant's Transcendental Imagination. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Greenberg, Robert. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. Penn State Press, 2001
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments).
Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy. Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards et al. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1930 (influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted).
Kitcher, Patricia. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998. . (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)
Melnick, Arthur. Kant's Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)
Paton, H.J. Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (extensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)
Pippin, Robert B. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie. F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy", )
Seung, T.K. Kant's Transcendental Logic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989 (the work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant).
Sturm, Thomas, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009. . review (Treats Kant's anthropology and his views on psychology and history in relation to his philosophy of science.)
Tonelli, Giorgio. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason within the Tradition of Modern Logic. A Commentary on its History. Hildesheim, Olms 1994
Werkmeister, W.H., Kant: The Architectonic and Development of His Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Ill.; 1980 (it treats, as a whole, the architectonic and development of Kant's philosophy from 1755 through the Opus postumum.)
Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review )
Practical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press 1990.
Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Dorschel, Andreas. Die idealistische Kritik des Willens: Versuch über die Theorie der praktischen Subjektivität bei Kant und Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 (Schriften zur Transzendentalphilosophie 10) .
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Michalson, Gordon E. Kant and the Problem of God. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy. University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.
Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
Seung, T.K. Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Johns Hopkins, 1994.
Wolff, Robert Paul. The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. .
Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Aesthetics
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Banham, Gary. Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Clewis, Robert. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. Wisconsin, 1974.
Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1979.
Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Immanuel Kant entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Kaplama, Erman. Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian. Lanham: UPA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Makkreel, Rudolf, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Chicago, 1990.
McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. SUNY, 1987.
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh, 1979.
Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso, 2000.
Philosophy of religion
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion : Volume Two of Kant's System of Perspectives. Ashgate, 2000.
Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales, v. 28, p. 91–103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)
Perpetual peace and international relations
Sir Harry Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and Mazzini ed. Gabriele Wight & Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Other works
Botul, Jean-Baptiste. La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. Paris, Éd. Mille et une Nuits, 2008.
Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties. Columbia University, 1980.
Kelly, Michael. Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, London: Swan Sonnenschein 1910. [Reprinted 2010 Nabu Press, ]
Mosser, Kurt. Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
White, Mark D. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character . Stanford University Press, 2011. . (Reviewed in The Montreal Review )
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence
Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
Hanna, Robert, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2004.
Hanna, Robert, Kant, Science, and Human Nature. Clarendon Press, 2006.
Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgement. Harvard University Press, 1993.
(A Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation.)
Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994. . (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)
Parfit, Derek. On What Matters (2 vols.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. Viking Press, 2007. . (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)
Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)
External links
KantPapers, authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University
Immanuel Kant at the Encyclopædia Britannica
Immanuel Kant in the Christian Cyclopedia
Works by Immanuel Kant at Duisburg-Essen University
Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology
Kant's Ethical Theory – Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated
Notes on Utilitarianism – A conveniently brief survey of Kant's Utilitarianism
"Immanuel Kant", An overview of his work, times, and influence on biology, plantspeopleplanet.org.au
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: An Overview
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Logic
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Mind
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Radical Evil
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Religion
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant
1724 births
1804 deaths
18th-century anthropologists
18th-century essayists
18th-century German male writers
18th-century German philosophers
18th-century German writers
18th-century non-fiction writers
18th-century Prussian people
19th-century anthropologists
19th-century essayists
19th-century German male writers
19th-century German non-fiction writers
19th-century German philosophers
19th-century German writers
19th-century Prussian people
19th-century social scientists
Age of Enlightenment
Continental philosophers
Cultural critics
Enlightenment philosophers
Epistemologists
Founders of philosophical traditions
German agnostics
German anthropologists
German classical liberals
German essayists
German ethicists
German idealism
German logicians
German Lutherans
German male non-fiction writers
German nationalists
German philosophers
German political philosophers
History of ethics
History of logic
History of philosophy
Humor researchers
Idealists
Intellectual history
Kantianism
Kantian philosophers
Lecturers
Logicians
Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
Metaphilosophers
Metaphysicians
Moral philosophers
Natural philosophers
Ontologists
People of the Age of Enlightenment
Philosophers of art
Philosophers of culture
Philosophers of education
Philosophers of ethics and morality
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of law
Philosophers of literature
Philosophers of logic
Philosophers of mind
Philosophers of religion
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of sexuality
Philosophers of social science
Philosophers of war
Philosophy writers
Political liberals (international relations)
Rationalists
Rationality theorists
Social critics
Social philosophers
Theorists on Western civilization
University of Königsberg alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about religion and science
| false |
[
"An only child is a person who does not have any siblings, neither biological nor adopted.\n\nOnly Child may also refer to:\n\n Only Child (novel), a novel by Jack Ketchum\n Only Child, a 2020 album by Sasha Sloan",
"John August Kusche (1869 – 1934) was a renowned botanist and entomologist, and he discovered many new species of moths and butterflies. The plant of the aster family, Erigeron kuschei is named in his honor.\n\nNotable discoveries \n\nIn 1928, Kusche donated to the Bishop Museum 164 species of Lepidoptera he collected on Kauai between 1919 and 1920. Of those, 55 species had not previously been recorded on Kauai and 6 were new to science, namely Agrotis stenospila, Euxoa charmocrita, Plusia violacea, Nesamiptis senicula, Nesamiptis proterortha and Scotorythra crocorrhoa.\n\nThe Essig Museum of Entomology lists 26 species collected by Kusche from California, Baja California, Arizona, Alaska and on the Solomon Islands.\n\nEarly life \nHis father's name was Johann Karl Wilhelm Kusche, he remarried in 1883 to Johanna Susanna Niesar. He had three siblings from his father (Herman, Ernst and Pauline) and four half siblings from her second marriage (Bertha, Wilhelm, Heinrich and Reinhold. There were two other children from this marriage, which died young and whom were not recorded). His family were farmers, while he lived with them, in Kreuzburg, Germany.\n\nHis siblings quickly accustomed themselves to their new mother, however August, the eldest, did not get on easily with her. He attended a gardening school there in Kreuzburg. He left at a relatively young age after unintentionally setting a forest fire. \"One day on a walk through Kreuzburg forest, he unintentionally caused a huge forest fire. Fearing jail, he fled from home and somehow made it to America.\"\n\nHe wrote letters back to his family, urging them to come to America. His father eventually did, sometime shortly after February 1893. His father started a homestead in Brownsville, Texas. Yellow fever broke out and his father caught it. He managed to survive, while many did not, leaving him a sick old man in his mid-fifties. He wrote to August, who was then living it Prescott, Arizona, asking for money. August wrote back, saying \"Dear father, if you are out of money, see to it that you go back to Germany as soon as possible. Without any money here, you are lost,\" \n\nAugust didn't have any money either, and had been hoping to borrow money from his father. If he had wanted to visit him, then he would have had to make the trip on foot.\n\nWhen August arrived in America, he got a job as a gardener on a Pennsylvania farm. He had an affair with a Swiss woman, which resulted in a child. August denied being the child's father, but married her anyway. He went west, on horseback, and had his horse stolen by Native Americans. He ended up in San Francisco. His family joined him there. By this time he had three sons and a daughter.\n\nAfter his children grew up, he began traveling and collecting moths and butterflies.\n\nLater life \nHe traveled to the South Seas where he collected moths and butterflies. There he caught a terrible fever that very nearly killed him. He was picked up by a government ship in New Guinea, and was unconscious until he awoke in a San Francisco hospital. After that time he had hearing loss and lost all of his teeth. His doctor told him not to take any more trips to Alaska, and this apparently helped his condition.\n\nIn 1924 he lived in San Diego. He had taken a trip to Alaska just before this date. He worked as a gardener in California for nine years (1915–1924) where he died of stomach cancer.\n\nReferences \n\n19th-century German botanists\n1869 births\n1934 deaths\n20th-century American botanists\nGerman emigrants to the United States"
] |
[
"Immanuel Kant",
"Biography",
"where was he born?",
"in Konigsberg, Prussia (",
"when was he born?",
"Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724",
"who were his parents?",
"His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg.",
"did he have any siblings?",
"Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood)."
] |
C_0c40c17950584bf09790550b98a1f802_1
|
where did he go to school?
| 5 |
Where did Immanuel Kant go to school?
|
Immanuel Kant
|
Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigsberg to a father from Nuremberg. (Her name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.) His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipeda, Lithuania). Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish; it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekule) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Kant was born into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in East Prussia. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained a belief in Christianity, in his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals he reveals a belief in human immortality as the necessary condition of our continued approach to the highest good possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of Theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -- he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigsberg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Konigsberg his whole life. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Gross-Arnsdorf (now Jarnoltowo near Morag (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km). CANNOTANSWER
|
His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.
|
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him an influential figure in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while "things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses.
Kant believed that reason is also the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political theory, and post-modern aesthetics. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond what he believed to be the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He wanted to put an end to what he saw as an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as Hume. He regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, and that perhaps this could be the culminating stage of world history. The nature of Kant's religious views continues to be the subject of scholarly dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he shifted from an early defense of an ontological argument for the existence of God to a principled agnosticism, to more critical treatments epitomized by Schopenhauer, who criticized the imperative form of Kantian ethics as "theological morals" and the "Mosaic Decalogue in disguise", and Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Beyond his religious views, Kant has also been criticized for the racism presented in some of his lesser-known papers, such as "On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy" and "On the Different Races of Man". Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history during his lifetime. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the Critique of Judgment (1790), Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
Biography
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg (since 1946 the city of Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen (today part of Priekulė) and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).
Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic, even though it has also been suggested that Kant intends other people to think of him as a "pure rationalist", who is defined by Kant himself as someone who recognizes revelation but asserts that to know and accept it as real is not a necessary requisite to religion.
Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).
Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–47).
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics and anthropology along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced (though through usually false premises and fallacious reasoning, according to Bertrand Russell) that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World). This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Critique of Pure Reason
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledgei.e. reasoned knowledgethese two being related but having very different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjectiveessentially illusoryseries of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more."
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Later work
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Death and burial
Kant's health, long poor, worsened and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut (It is good)" before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well-known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it — as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant — the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating. Was Kant's forehead shaped this way in these images because he was a philosopher, or, to follow the implications of Lavater's system, was he a philosopher because of the intellectual acuity manifested by his forehead? Kant and Johann Kaspar Lavater were correspondents on theological matters, and Lavater refers to Kant in his work "Physiognomic Fragments, for the Education of Human Knowledge and Love of People" (Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775–1778).
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
In late November 2018, his tomb and statue were vandalized with paint by unknown assailants, who also scattered leaflets glorifying Rus' and denouncing Kant as a "traitor". The incident is apparently connected with a recent vote to rename Khrabrovo Airport, where Kant was in the lead for a while, prompting Russian nationalist resentment.
Philosophy
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", he defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically.
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. If he fails to do either (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for
Kant drew a parallel between the Copernican revolution and the epistemology of his new transcendental philosophy, involving two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
the epistemology of transcendental idealism and
the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the accidental accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it depend on the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called "synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars about the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by philosophers after Kant. It was argued that, because the "thing in itself" was unknowable, its existence must not be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real", as did the German Idealists, another group arose who asked how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Epistemology
Theory of perception
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.
Firstly, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions:
Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."
Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone," or, "All bodies have weight."
An analytic proposition is true by nature of the meaning of the words in the sentence — we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, a synthetic statement is one that tells us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
Kant contests this assumption by claiming that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. His main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and that space and time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and so it appears that arithmetic is analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved by considering the calculation 5 + 7 = 12: there is nothing in the numbers 5 and 7 by which the number 12 can be inferred. Thus "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not — the statement "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. Thus Kant argued that a proposition can be synthetic and a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based on the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. But our mind processes this information and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without concepts, perceptions are nondescript; without perceptions, concepts are meaningless. Thus the famous statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind."
Kant also claims that an external environment is necessary for the establishment of the self. Although Kant would want to argue that there is no empirical way of observing the self, we can see the logical necessity of the self when we observe that we can have different perceptions of the external environment over time. By uniting these general representations into one global representation, we can see how a transcendental self emerges. "I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one."
Categories of the Faculty of Understanding
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. How is this possible? Kant's solution was that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are synthetic, a priori laws of nature that apply to all objects before we experience them. To deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This is commonly called a transcendental deduction.
To begin with, Kant's distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. If we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge is always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it for anyone at any time, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori (universal and necessary knowledge)? Before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of understanding.
For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.
To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.
One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle's syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle's system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant's categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject's current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words, we filter what we see and hear.
Transcendental schema doctrine
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the (transcendental) schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect. In the context of transcendental schema the concept of transcendental reflection is of a great importance.
Ethics
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
In Groundwork, Kant tries to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works used "practical reason", which is based only on things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which can be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral law. The Categorical Imperative provides a test against which moral statements can be assessed. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends based on physical needs or wants create hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative can only be based on something that is an "end in itself", that is, an end that is not a means to some other need, desire, or purpose. Kant believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act on the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.
Unlike a hypothetical imperative, a categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent. In the same book, Kant stated:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
According to Kant, one cannot make exceptions for oneself. The philosophical maxim on which one acts should always be considered to be a universal law without exception. One cannot allow oneself to do a particular action unless one thinks it appropriate that the reason for the action should become a universal law. For example, one should not steal, however dire the circumstancesbecause, by permitting oneself to steal, one makes stealing a universally acceptable act. This is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, often known as the universalizability principle.
Kant believed that, if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise, it is meaningless. The final result is not the most important aspect of an action; rather, how the person feels while carrying out the action is the time when value is attached to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf"), Appendix 1.
First formulation
The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature". This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"
One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps:
Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take, for example, the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Together, they form the maxim.
Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.
Decide if contradictions or irrationalities would arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
If a contradiction or irrationality would arise, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
Second formulation
The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".
Third formulation
The third formulation (i.e. Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It states "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".
In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a universal code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". No one may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Commentators, starting in the 20th century, have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, though this was not the prevalent view in the 19th century. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters first made Kant famous, wrote "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first Kant commentaries, wrote "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" This view continued throughout the 19th century, as noted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said "Kant's success is merely a theologian's success." The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology, and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which had been convulsing the European academy for much of the 18th century. Spinozism was widely seen as the cause of the Pantheism controversy, and as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. This, coupled with his moral philosophy (his argument that the existence of morality is a rational reason why God and an afterlife do and must exist), was the reason he was seen by many, at least through the end of the 19th century, as a great defender of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) for the existence of God and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967). Nevertheless, other interpreters consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief. Kant sees in Jesus Christ the affirmation of a "pure moral disposition of the heart" that "can make man well-pleasing to God". Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Idea of freedom
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed" and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done". (The same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced.)
Categories of freedom
In the Critique of Practical Reason, at the end of the second Main Part of the Analytics, Kant introduces the categories of freedom, in analogy with the categories of understanding their practical counterparts. Kant's categories of freedom apparently function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Aesthetic philosophy
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori." After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e. judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity (§§ 20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense (§40). Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant developed a theory of humor (§ 54) that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music. His knowledge of music, however, has been reported to be much weaker than his sense of humor: He told many more jokes throughout his lectures and writings.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Political philosophy
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in "Perpetual Peace" as natural rather than rational:
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization. "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law'. Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. "A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
Anthropology
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three and a half years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's secondary dissertation for his State doctorate, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Introduction to Kant's Anthropology was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted them in two dimensions: (1) "activation", or energetic aspect of behaviour, and (2) "orientation on emotionality". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic; Phlegmatics as balanced and weak; Sanguines as balanced and energetic, and Melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explored the things that a human "can and should make of himself."
Racism
Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism, and some have claimed that he was one of the central figures in the birth of modern scientific racism. Where figures such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had supposed only "empirical" observation for racism, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race. Using the Four Temperaments of ancient Greece, he proposed a hierarchy of four racial categories: white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, and red Amerindians.
Kant wrote that "[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He stated that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". He quotes David Hume as challenging anyone to "cite a [single] example in which a Negro has shown talents" and asserts that, among the "hundreds of thousands" of blacks transported during the Atlantic slave trade, even among the freed "still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, describing them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said the Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."
Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and the "fusing of races" is undesireable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He stated that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, Nature has here made a law of just the opposite". He believed that in the future all races would be extinguished, except that of the whites.
Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who often gloss over this part of his life and works. He wrote about Kant's ideas of race:
Pauline Kleingeld argues that while Kant was indeed a staunch advocate of scientific racism for much of his career, his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant unambiguously rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework. While Kant's perspective on the topic of European colonialism became more balanced, he still considered Europeans "civilized" to the exception of others:
Influence and legacy
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e. that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted in several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in postmodern philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
The human subject seen as the centre of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are for us;
The notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits to our ability to know entirely a priori;
The notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe . . . : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions;
The theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;
His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;
His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.
Historical influence
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to his thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German idealism developed from his writings. The German idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute", "God", and "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
The influential English Romantic poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German idealism generally, in the UK and the USA. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. The main accusations Hegel charged Kant's philosophy with were formalism (or "abstractism") and irrationality. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e human consciousness) apart from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction, that Hegel called the "absolute idealism". Similar concerns moved Hegel's criticisms to Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will. Michael Kelly, in the preface to his 1910 book Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, stated: "Of Kant it may be said that what is good and true in his philosophy would have been buried with him, were it not for Schopenhauer...."
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (see Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.
Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Influence on modern thinkers
With his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard, however, emphasized the indeterminacy in the nature of thought and language and has engaged in debates with Habermas based on the effects this indeterminacy has on philosophical and political debates.
Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.
Kant's influence also has extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, but which he later criticised heavily and rejected. He held the view that "[I]f one does not want to assert that relativity theory goes against reason, one cannot retain the a priori concepts and norms of Kant's system". However, Kant scholar Stephen Palmquist has argued that Einstein's rejection of Kant's influence was primarily "a response to mistaken interpretations of Kant being adopted by contemporary philosophers", when in fact Kant's transcendental perspective informed Einstein's early worldview and led to his insights regarding simultaneity, and eventually to his proposal of the theory of relativity. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Film/television
Kant and his work was heavily referenced in the comedy television show The Good Place, as the show deals with the subject of ethics and moral philosophy.
Bibliography
List of major works
(1749) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
(March 1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
(April 1755) Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio (master's thesis under Johann Gottfried Teske))
(September 1755) A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (doctoral thesis))
(1756) The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology (Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophin naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam, abbreviated as Monadologia Physica (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))
(1762) The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
(1763) The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
(1763) Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
(1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
(1764) Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
(1764) Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
(1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers)
(1768) On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space (Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume)
(August 1770) Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (doctoral thesis))
(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
(1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?")
(1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht")
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1786) "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" ("Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?")
(1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte)
(1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
(1790) Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)
(1793) Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
(1793) On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
(1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden")
(1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten)
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
(1804) Opus Postumum
(1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K.H.L. Pölitz) [The English edition of A.W. Wood & G.M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.]
Collected works in German
Printed version
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9),
II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13),
III. Kant's literary remains, or Nachlass (vols. 14–23), and
IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29).
Electronic version
Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).
See also
Notes
References
Works cited
Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Page numbers citing this work are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902–38).
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. .
Further reading
In Germany, one important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1966) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
General introductions to his thought
Broad, C.D. Kant: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1999.
Martin, Gottfried. Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Greenwood Press, 1955 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's System of Perspectives : an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
Seung, T.K. 2007. Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum.
Satyananda Giri. Kant. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001. (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)
Uleman, Jennifer. An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Luchte, James. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. The Athlone Press, 1983.
Biography and historical context
Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Harvard University Press, 2002
Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translation of Kants Leben und Lehre. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kanta study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).
Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
Johnson, G.R. (ed.). Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)
Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und –theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)
Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760–1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
Pippin, Robert. Idealism as Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2000.
Schabert, Joseph A. "Kant's Influence on his Successors", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVII, January 1922.
Collections of essays
Firestone, Chris L. and Palmquist, Stephen (eds.). Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Förster, Eckart (ed.). Kant's Transcendental Deductions:. The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich.
Guyer, Paul (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought.
Mohanty, J.N. and Shahan, Robert W. (eds.). Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Phillips, Dewi et al. (eds.). Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.
Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.
Theoretical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised).
Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English).
Banham, Gary. Kant's Transcendental Imagination. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984.
Greenberg, Robert. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. Penn State Press, 2001
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments).
Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant's Philosophy. Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards et al. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1930 (influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted).
Kitcher, Patricia. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998. . (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)
Melnick, Arthur. Kant's Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)
Paton, H.J. Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (extensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)
Pippin, Robert B. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie. F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Critique of the Kantian Philosophy", )
Seung, T.K. Kant's Transcendental Logic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989 (the work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant).
Sturm, Thomas, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009. . review (Treats Kant's anthropology and his views on psychology and history in relation to his philosophy of science.)
Tonelli, Giorgio. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason within the Tradition of Modern Logic. A Commentary on its History. Hildesheim, Olms 1994
Werkmeister, W.H., Kant: The Architectonic and Development of His Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Ill.; 1980 (it treats, as a whole, the architectonic and development of Kant's philosophy from 1755 through the Opus postumum.)
Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review )
Practical philosophy
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge University Press 1990.
Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Dorschel, Andreas. Die idealistische Kritik des Willens: Versuch über die Theorie der praktischen Subjektivität bei Kant und Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992 (Schriften zur Transzendentalphilosophie 10) .
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Michalson, Gordon E. Kant and the Problem of God. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy. University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.
Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
Seung, T.K. Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Johns Hopkins, 1994.
Wolff, Robert Paul. The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. .
Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Aesthetics
Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Banham, Gary. Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Clewis, Robert. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. Wisconsin, 1974.
Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1979.
Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Immanuel Kant entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Kaplama, Erman. Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian. Lanham: UPA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Makkreel, Rudolf, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Chicago, 1990.
McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. SUNY, 1987.
Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh, 1979.
Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso, 2000.
Philosophy of religion
Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion : Volume Two of Kant's System of Perspectives. Ashgate, 2000.
Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales, v. 28, p. 91–103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)
Perpetual peace and international relations
Sir Harry Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and Mazzini ed. Gabriele Wight & Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Other works
Botul, Jean-Baptiste. La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant. Paris, Éd. Mille et une Nuits, 2008.
Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Reference, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties. Columbia University, 1980.
Kelly, Michael. Kant's Ethics and Schopenhauer's Criticism, London: Swan Sonnenschein 1910. [Reprinted 2010 Nabu Press, ]
Mosser, Kurt. Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
White, Mark D. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character . Stanford University Press, 2011. . (Reviewed in The Montreal Review )
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence
Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
Hanna, Robert, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2004.
Hanna, Robert, Kant, Science, and Human Nature. Clarendon Press, 2006.
Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgement. Harvard University Press, 1993.
(A Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation.)
Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)
McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994. . (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)
Parfit, Derek. On What Matters (2 vols.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. Viking Press, 2007. . (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)
Wood, Allen W. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. . (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)
External links
KantPapers, authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University
Immanuel Kant at the Encyclopædia Britannica
Immanuel Kant in the Christian Cyclopedia
Works by Immanuel Kant at Duisburg-Essen University
Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology
Kant's Ethical Theory – Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated
Notes on Utilitarianism – A conveniently brief survey of Kant's Utilitarianism
"Immanuel Kant", An overview of his work, times, and influence on biology, plantspeopleplanet.org.au
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: An Overview
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Logic
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Mind
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Radical Evil
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant: Philosophy of Religion
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Immanuel Kant
1724 births
1804 deaths
18th-century anthropologists
18th-century essayists
18th-century German male writers
18th-century German philosophers
18th-century German writers
18th-century non-fiction writers
18th-century Prussian people
19th-century anthropologists
19th-century essayists
19th-century German male writers
19th-century German non-fiction writers
19th-century German philosophers
19th-century German writers
19th-century Prussian people
19th-century social scientists
Age of Enlightenment
Continental philosophers
Cultural critics
Enlightenment philosophers
Epistemologists
Founders of philosophical traditions
German agnostics
German anthropologists
German classical liberals
German essayists
German ethicists
German idealism
German logicians
German Lutherans
German male non-fiction writers
German nationalists
German philosophers
German political philosophers
History of ethics
History of logic
History of philosophy
Humor researchers
Idealists
Intellectual history
Kantianism
Kantian philosophers
Lecturers
Logicians
Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
Metaphilosophers
Metaphysicians
Moral philosophers
Natural philosophers
Ontologists
People of the Age of Enlightenment
Philosophers of art
Philosophers of culture
Philosophers of education
Philosophers of ethics and morality
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of law
Philosophers of literature
Philosophers of logic
Philosophers of mind
Philosophers of religion
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of sexuality
Philosophers of social science
Philosophers of war
Philosophy writers
Political liberals (international relations)
Rationalists
Rationality theorists
Social critics
Social philosophers
Theorists on Western civilization
University of Königsberg alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about religion and science
| true |
[
"Where Did We Go Wrong may refer to:\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\" (Dondria song), 2010\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\" (Toni Braxton and Babyface song), 2013\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a song by Petula Clark from the album My Love\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a song by Diana Ross from the album Ross\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a 1980 song by Frankie Valli",
"California Concordia College existed in Oakland, California, United States from 1906 until 1973.\n\nAmong the presidents of California Concordia College was Johann Theodore Gotthold Brohm Jr.\n\nCalifornia Concordia College and the Academy of California College were located at 2365 Camden Street, Oakland, California. Some of the school buildings still exist at this location, but older buildings that housed the earlier classrooms and later the dormitories are gone. The site is now the location of the Spectrum Center Camden Campus, a provider of special education services.\n\nThe \"Academy\" was the official name for the high school. California Concordia was a six-year institution patterned after the German gymnasium. This provided four years of high school, plus two years of junior college. Years in the school took their names from Latin numbers and referred to the years to go before graduation. The classes were named:\n\n Sexta - 6 years to go; high school freshman\n Qunita - 5 years to go; high school sophomore\n Quarta - 4 years to go; high school junior\n Tertia - 3 years to go; high school senior\n Secunda - 2 years to go; college freshman\n Prima - 1 year to go; college sophomore\n\nThose in Sexta were usually hazed in a mild way by upperclassmen. In addition, those in Sexta were required to do a certain amount of clean-up work around the school, such as picking up trash.\n\nMost students, even high school freshmen, lived in dormitories. High school students were supervised by \"proctors\" (selected high school seniors in Tertia). High school students were required to study for two hours each night in their study rooms from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. Students could not leave their rooms for any reason without permission. This requirement came as quite a shock to those in Sexta (freshmen) on their first night, when they were caught and scolded by a proctor when they left their study room to go to the bathroom without permission. Seniors (those in Tertia) were allowed one night off where they did not need to be in their study hall.\n\nFrom 9:00 to 9:30 pm all students gathered for a chapel service. From 9:30 to 10 pm, high school students were free to roam, and sometimes went to the local Lucky Supermarket to purchase snacks. All high school students were required to be in bed with lights out by 10:00 pm. There were generally five students in each dormitory room. The room had two sections: a bedroom area and (across the hallway) another room for studying. Four beds, including at least one bunk bed, were in the bedroom, and four or five desks were in the study room\n\nA few interesting words used by Concordia students were \"fink\" and \"rack.\" To \"fink\" meant to \"sing like a canary\" or \"squeal.\" A student who finked told everything he knew about a misbehavior committed by another student. \"Rack\" was actually an official term used by proctors and administrators who lived on campus in the dormitories with students. When students misbehaved they were racked (punished). Proctors held a meeting once a week and decided which students, if any, deserved to be racked. If a student were racked, he might be forbidden from leaving the campus grounds, even during normal free time School hours were from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm. After 3:30 pm and until 7:00 pm, students could normally explore the local area surrounding the school, for example, to go to a local store to buy a snack. However, if a student were racked for the week, he could not do so.\n\nProctors made their rounds in the morning to make sure beds were made and inspected rooms in the evening to ensure that students were in bed by 10:00 pm. Often after the proctors left a room at night, the room lights would go back on and students enjoyed studying their National Geographic magazines. Student might be racked if they failed to make their beds or did not make them neatly enough.\n\nAlthough California Concordia College no longer exists, it does receive some recognition by Concordia University Irvine. This is also the location of its old academic records.\n\nSources\n\nExternal links \n Photos of old campus\n\nEducational institutions disestablished in 1973\nDefunct private universities and colleges in California\nEducational institutions established in 1906\n1906 establishments in California\n1973 disestablishments in California\nUniversities and colleges affiliated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod"
] |
[
"Sepultura",
"Max Cavalera era"
] |
C_80c1f49fa04b42edad75aebd7cc3b286_1
|
What was the Max Cavalera era?
| 1 |
What was the Max Cavalera era in relation to Sepultura?
|
Sepultura
|
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vania, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motorhead song "Dancing on Your Grave". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne and V8. They would travel to a record shop in Sao Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it: The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Megadeth, Exodus and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno and Dorsal Atlantica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcofago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist. CANNOTANSWER
|
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
|
Sepultura (, "grave") is a Brazilian heavy metal band from Belo Horizonte. Formed in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the band was a major force in the groove metal, thrash metal and death metal genres during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their later experiments drawing influence from alternative metal, world music, nu metal, hardcore punk, and industrial metal. Sepultura has also been credited as one of the second wave of thrash metal acts from the late 1980s to early-to-mid-1990s.
The band has had several lineup changes throughout its existence, with Max and Igor Cavalera departing in 1996 and 2006, respectively. Sepultura's current lineup consists of vocalist Derrick Green (who replaced Max in 1998), guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Jr. and drummer Eloy Casagrande (who replaced Igor's successor Jean Dolabella in 2011). Since Igor Cavalera's departure in 2006, there have been no original members left in the band. Although Paulo Jr. joined Sepultura shortly after its formation in late 1984 and is the longest serving member, he did not play on any of the band's studio albums until Chaos A.D. (1993). Kisser, who replaced onetime guitarist Jairo Guedz, has appeared on all of Sepultura's records since their second full-length Schizophrenia (1987); he also recorded bass guitar until Chaos A.D..
Sepultura has released fifteen studio albums to date, the latest being Quadra (2020). Their most successful records are Beneath the Remains (1989), Arise (1991), Chaos A.D. (1993), and Roots (1996). Sepultura has sold over three million units in the United States and almost 20 million worldwide, gaining multiple gold and platinum records around the globe, including in countries as diverse as France, Australia, Indonesia, United States, Cyprus, and their native Brazil.
History
Formation, Bestial Devastation and Morbid Visions (1984–1986)
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vânia, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motörhead song "Dancing on Your Grave".
The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, and V8. They would travel to a record shop in São Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it:
The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Slayer, Megadeth, Exodus, and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno, and Dorsal Atlântica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcófago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist.
After about a year of performing, Sepultura signed to Cogumelo Records in 1985. Later that year, they released Bestial Devastation, a shared EP with fellow Brazilian band Overdose. It was recorded and self-produced in just two days. The band recorded their first full-length album, Morbid Visions, in August 1986. It contained their first hit, "Troops of Doom", which gained some media attention. The band then decided to relocate to the larger city of São Paulo.
Schizophrenia, Beneath the Remains, and Arise (1987–1992)
In early 1987, Jairo Guedz quit the band. Guedz was replaced by São Paulo-based guitarist Andreas Kisser, and they released their second studio album, Schizophrenia, later that year. The album reflected a stylistic change towards a more thrash metal-oriented sound, while still keeping the death metal elements of Morbid Visions. Schizophrenia was an improvement in production and performance, and became a minor critical sensation across Europe and America as a much sought-after import. The band sent tapes to the United States that made radio playlists at a time when they were struggling to book gigs, because club owners were afraid to book them due to their style. The band gained attention from Roadrunner Records who signed them and released Schizophrenia internationally before seeing the band perform in person.
During a May 2018 interview with teenyrockers.com, Kisser noted that Sepultura would not have been possible without family support, not only from his own family, but also from the families of Max and Igor, and Paulo Jr.
The band's third studio album, Beneath the Remains, was released in 1989. The album was recorded in a rustic studio in Rio de Janeiro while the band communicated through translators with the American producer Scott Burns. It was an immediate success and became known in thrash metal circles as a classic on the order of Slayer's Reign in Blood. It was hailed by Terrorizer magazine as one of the all-time top 20 thrash metal albums, as well as gaining a place in their all-time top 40 death metal records. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "The complete absence of filler here makes this one of the most essential death/thrash metal albums of all time." A long European and American tour furthered the band's reputation, despite the fact that they were still very limited English speakers. Sepultura's first live dates outside of Brazil were opening for Sodom on their Agent Orange tour in Europe; following this was Sepultura's first US show, which was held on October 31, 1989 at the Ritz in New York City, opening for Danish heavy metal band King Diamond. The band filmed its first video for the song "Inner Self", which received considerable airplay on MTV's Headbangers Ball, giving Sepultura their first exposure in North America. Touring in support of Beneath the Remains continued throughout much of 1990, including three shows in Brazil with Napalm Death, European dates with Mordred and a US tour with Obituary and Sadus.
In January 1991, Sepultura played for more than 100,000 people at the Rock in Rio II festival. The band relocated from their native Brazil to Phoenix, Arizona in 1990, obtained new management, and recorded the album Arise at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida. By the time the album was released in March 1991, the band had become one of the most critically praised thrash/death metal bands of the time. The first single "Dead Embryonic Cells" was a success, and the title track gained additional attention when its video was banned by MTV America due to its apocalyptic religious imagery; it did, however, get some airplay on Headbangers Ball as did the music videos for "Dead Embryonic Cells" and "Desperate Cry". Arise was critically acclaimed and their first to chart on the Billboard 200, reaching No. 119.
Sepultura toured relentlessly throughout 1991 and 1992 in support of Arise; its touring cycle began in May 1991 with a European trek with Sacred Reich and Heathen, followed by the New Titans on the Block tour in the US that included support from Sacred Reich, Napalm Death and Sick of It All. They also played with several other bands, including Slayer, Testament, Motörhead, Kreator, White Zombie, Type O Negative and Fudge Tunnel, and along with Alice in Chains, Sepultura supported Ozzy Osbourne on his No More Tears tour. Max Cavalera married the band's manager Gloria Bujnowski during this period. The Arise tour concluded in December 1992 with a US tour, where the band (along with Helmet) supported Ministry's Psalm 69 tour.
Chaos A.D., Nailbomb and Roots (1993–1996)
Sepultura's fifth album, Chaos A.D., was released in 1993. Supported by the singles "Refuse/Resist", "Territory" and "Slave New World", this was their only album to be released in North America by Epic Records, and the first of two albums by Sepultura to be certified gold there. It saw a departure from their death metal style, adding influences of groove metal, industrial and hardcore punk. While Chaos A.D. is not a death metal album, the album does include elements of thrash metal music. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and wrote that, "Chaos A.D. ranks as one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time." The band did a year-long tour in support of Chaos A.D., starting with a headlining European run with Paradise Lost, followed by a US tour with Fudge Tunnel, Fear Factory and Clutch. They were also one of the support acts (along with Biohazard and Prong) for Pantera's Far Beyond Driven tour in North America, and then opened for the Ramones in South America and toured Australia and New Zealand with Sacred Reich. By the time the Chaos A.D. tour ended in November 1994, Sepultura was one of the most successful heavy metal bands of the day.
Also in 1994, Max and Igor collaborated with Alex Newport of Fudge Tunnel to form Nailbomb. They released an even more industrial-oriented album, Point Blank the same year. The group performed only one full live gig at Dynamo Open Air in 1995, and the performance was released as Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide. Nailbomb was disbanded shortly afterwards.
Sepultura's sound change continued with their sixth album, Roots, which was released in 1996. On this album the band experimented with elements of the music of Brazil's indigenous peoples, and adopted a slower, down-tuned sound. The album was hailed as a modern-day heavy metal classic and a major influence on the then-nascent nu metal scene. AllMusic gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "Roots consolidates Sepultura's position as perhaps the most distinctive, original heavy metal band of the 1990s." In 1996, Sepultura performed "War (Guerra)" for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Departure of Max Cavalera, Derrick Green joins and Against (1996–2000)
In August 1996, Sepultura played on the Castle Donington Monsters of Rock main stage alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Biohazard, and Fear Factory. The band was suddenly a three-piece with Andreas Kisser taking over on lead vocals, after Max Cavalera left the concert site earlier in the day upon learning of the death of his stepson Dana Wells in a car accident. After Dana Wells' funeral was finished, Max returned and continued to tour with Sepultura. A few months after Wells' death, the band had a meeting with Max and said that they wanted to fire their manager Gloria Bujnowski, who was Max's wife and Dana's mother, and find new management. Their reasoning was that Bujnowski was giving preferential treatment to Max while neglecting the rest of the band. Max, who was still coming to terms with the death of Wells, felt betrayed by his bandmates for wanting to get rid of Bujnowski and abruptly quit the band. Max Cavalera's final performance with Sepultura was at Brixton Academy in England on December 16, 1996.
Following Max Cavalera's departure, the remaining members of Sepultura announced plans to find a new vocalist. Among those who auditioned were Chuck Billy of Testament, Phil Demmel of Machine Head and Vio-lence, Marc Grewe of Morgoth, Jorge Rosado of Merauder and a then-unknown Jason "Gong" Jones. American musician Derrick Green from Cleveland, Ohio, was selected as the band's new front-man. The first album with the new line-up was Against, which was released in 1998. The album was critically and commercially less successful than previous albums and sold considerably fewer copies than the debut album by Max Cavalera's new band Soulfly. In a retrospective review AllMusic gave the album 3 stars out of 5, stating that "there are enough flashes of the old Sepultura brilliance to suggest that great things are still to come".
Nation and Roorback (2001–2005)
The band's eighth album, Nation, released in 2001, sold poorly. It would be their last studio album with Roadrunner Records. AllMusic gives the album 3 stars out of 5 and said, "As Green scrapes the lining of his vocal chords through the brash, impassioned tracks, he's singing about more than just 'one nation, Sepulnation'; he's suggesting something bigger, something worth shouting about and fighting for." In an interview, Derrick Green said that, "Every song will be related to the idea of building this nation. We will have our own flags, our own anthem." A recording of Max Cavalera's last live show with Sepultura, titled Under a Pale Grey Sky, was released in 2002 by Roadrunner Records.
After recording Revolusongs, an EP of covers in 2002, the band released their ninth studio album, Roorback, in 2003. Despite receiving greater critical acclaim than its predecessors, sales remained low. It was their first album with SPV Records. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "if there are still any lingering doubts about the Green/Sepultura match, 2003's excellent Roorback should put them to rest for good. Green is passionate and focused throughout the album — he has no problem going that extra mile — and the writing is consistently strong." In 2005, the band played in Dubai for the annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival. In November of that year, a live double DVD/double CD package, Live in São Paulo, was released. This was the first official live album from the band.
Dante XXI, A-Lex, and departure of Igor Cavalera (2006–2010)
Sepultura's tenth album, Dante XXI, was released on March 14, 2006. It is a concept album based on Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Music videos were recorded for the songs "Convicted in Life" and "Ostia". AllMusic gave the album 3.5 stars out of 5 and said that, "Overall, Dante XXI is easily one of Sepultura's strongest releases to feature Green on vocals."
In a 2007 interview with Revolver magazine, Max Cavalera stated that he and Igor, both of whom having recently reconciled after a decade-long feud, would reunite with the original Sepultura lineup. There were also rumors that the reunited line up would play on the main stage at Ozzfest 2007. However, this was denied by Kisser and the reunion did not occur. Instead, Igor Cavalera left the band after the release of Dante XXI and was replaced by Brazilian drummer Jean Dolabella, leaving the band without any of its original members. After leaving Sepultura, Igor and Max formed Cavalera Conspiracy.
The band was one of the featured musical guests at the Latin Grammy Awards of 2008 on November 13. They performed a cover of "The Girl from Ipanema", and "We've Lost You" from the album A-Lex. The 9th annual Latin Grammy Awards ceremony was held at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas and aired on Univision. Sepultura also appeared in a successful ad campaign for Volkswagen motors commercial that aired nationally throughout Brazil in 2008. The spot said that "it's the first time you've seen Sepultura like this. And a Sedan like this one too". The Volkswagen TV spot shows Sepultura playing bossa nova, the opposite of its heavy metal style, to say that "you never saw something like this, as you never saw a car like the new Voyage."
Sepultura released the album A-Lex on January 26, 2009. This was the first Sepultura album to include neither of the Cavalera brothers, with bassist Paulo Jr. as the sole remaining member from the band's debut album. A-Lex is a concept album based on the book A Clockwork Orange. The album was recorded at Trama Studios in São Paulo, Brazil, with producer Stanley Soares. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "Personnel changes can have a very negative effect on a band, but Sepultura have maintained their vitality all these years – and that vitality is alive and well on the superb A-Lex." In the same year Andreas Kisser contributed his recipe for "Churrasco in Soy Sauce" to Hellbent for Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook, stating in the recipe that he prefers his meat "medium-rare". Sepultura supported Metallica on January 30 and 31, 2010, at Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil. The two concerts were attended by 100,000 people. The band filmed a concert DVD in 2010. Sepultura played at Kucukciftlik Park, Istanbul, on April 27, 2010. On August 8, 2010 visited the UK to play at the Hevy Music Festival near Folkestone.
Kairos and The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2010–2015)
On July 6, 2010, it was announced that Sepultura were signed with Nuclear Blast Records, and would release their first album for the label in 2011. The band confirmed that there would be no reunion of the classic lineup. By the end of 2010, the band began writing new material and entered the studio to begin recording their 12th album with producer Roy Z (Judas Priest, Halford, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, Helloween and Andre Matos). On March 1, 2011, Sepultura had completed recording their new album, entitled Kairos, which was released in June 2011.
The album includes cover versions of Ministry's "Just One Fix" and The Prodigy's "Firestarter", both of which are available as bonus tracks on various special-edition releases. Sepultura played on the Kairos World Tour and at Wacken Open Air 2011. Drummer Jean Dolabella left the band and was replaced by 20-year-old Eloy Casagrande in November 2011, who had already played in Brazilian heavy metal singer Andre Matos' solo band and in the Brazilian post-hardcore band Gloria. In November and December 2011 Sepultura participated the Thrashfest Classics 2011 tour alongside thrash metal bands like Exodus, Destruction, Heathen, and Mortal Sin.
In May 2012, guitarist Andreas Kisser told Metal Underground that Sepultura would soon "start working on something new with Eloy" and see if they could "get ready for new music early next year". In an interview at England's Bloodstock Open Air on August 10, 2012, Kisser revealed that Sepultura would be filming a live DVD with the French percussive group Les Tambours du Bronx. He also revealed that the band was "already thinking about new ideas" for their next album and would "have something new going on" in 2013.
On December 10, 2012, producer Ross Robinson, who produced Sepultura's Roots album, tweeted: "Oh, didn't mention.. Spoke to Andreas, it's on. My vision, smoke Roots" suggesting he would be producing the band's next album. This was later confirmed, as well as an announcement that the album would be co-produced by Steve Evetts. Former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo made a guest appearance on the album.
On January 25, 2013, it was announced that author Jason Korolenko was working on Relentless – 30 Years of Sepultura, which is described in a press release as "the only book-length biography to cover the band's entire 30-year career." Relentless was published on October 8, 2014 in Poland under the title Brazylijska Furia, and the English language edition was published via Rocket 88 on December 4, 2014. The Brazilian edition, titled Relentless – 30 Anos de Sepultura, is scheduled for publication via Benvira in early 2015. The French language edition of "Relentless" was published in France on October 19, 2015.
On July 19, 2013, it was revealed that the title of the band's thirteenth album was The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart. In September 2013, they performed at Rock in Rio with Brazilian rock/MPB artist Zé Ramalho – this line-up was named "Zépultura", a portmanteau of both artists' names.
Machine Messiah and Quadra (2016–present)
After spending more than two years of touring in support of The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart, Sepultura entered the studio in mid-2016 to begin recording their fourteenth studio album, with Jens Bogren as the producer. The resulting album, Machine Messiah, was released on January 13, 2017. Sepultura promoted the album with a series of world tours, including supporting Kreator on their Gods of Violence tour in Europe in February–March 2017, and along with Prong, they supported Testament on the latter's Brotherhood of the Snake tour in the United States in April–May 2017. The band also toured Europe in February and March 2018 with Obscura, Goatwhore and Fit for an Autopsy, and Australia in May with Death Angel.
The first official Sepultura documentary, Sepultura Endurance, was premiered in May 2017 and released on June 17. Max and Igor declined to be interviewed for the film and also refused to allow early material of the band to be used.
In an August 2018 interview at Wacken Open Air, Kisser confirmed that Sepultura had begun the songwriting process of their fifteenth studio album, and stated later that month that it was not expected to be released before 2020. The band began recording the album, again with producer Bogren, in August 2019 for a tentative February 2020 release.
In October 2019, during their performance at Rock in Rio 8, the band announced the name and revealed the cover for their fifteenth studio album, which would be named Quadra. They also played the lead single, named "Isolation", which is also the opening track for the album. On November 8, they released the studio version of "Isolation" and announced that Quadra would be released on February 7, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sepultura had not been able to tour or play any shows in support of Quadra for over two years after its release. They played their first show in two years at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro on February 12, 2022. The band will promote Quadra by touring the United States with Sacred Reich, Crowbar and Art of Shock, and Europe with the two-thirds of US leg (only Sacred Reich and Crowbar remaining); due to the COVID-19 situation, the tours had been rescheduled to two years from March and April 2020 and a year from the fall of 2021 respectively.
Sepultura released a quarantine collaboration album on August 13, 2021, titled SepulQuarta, which includes contributions by members of Megadeth, Testament, Anthrax, System of a Down, Trivium and Sacred Reich.
Musical style, influences, and legacy
Sepultura's early influences were heavy metal and hard rock groups such as Kiss, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Iron Maiden, Venom, Celtic Frost, Twisted Sister and Whitesnake, as well as thrash metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, Testament, Anthrax, Kreator, Sodom and Destruction and death metal bands Possessed and Death. They were also influenced by punk rock music, including bands such as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Discharge, S.O.D., Amebix and New Model Army. Andreas Kisser has affirmed that "without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible."
Sepultura's music comes in a wide range of heavy metal musical styles. The band has been described mainly as thrash metal and death metal, and considered one of the primary inventors of the latter genre. Another genre the band has been commonly categorized under is groove metal. The band later on started experimenting with elements of other musical genres such as hardcore punk, industrial metal, alternative metal, world music and nu metal.
Elements of Latin music, samba and Brazilian folk and tribal music have also been incorporated into Sepultura's metal style, particularly on Roots. Roots was partly recorded with the indigenous Xavante tribe in Mato Grosso, and incorporates percussion, rhythms, chanting and lyrical themes inspired by the collaboration.
Looking back on the band's career arc for a 2016 article on Max and Igor Cavalera's retrospective Return to Roots tour (in commemoration of the album's 20th anniversary), Nashville Scene contributor Saby Reyes-Kulkarni observed that "Before Chaos A.D., the overwhelming majority of metal had a 'white' feel to it. Sepultura changed that forever. And with Roots, the band went a step further, asserting once and for all that the genre can accommodate native stylings from any culture, much like jazz had done for decades prior."
MTV has called Sepultura the most successful Brazilian heavy metal band in history and "perhaps the most important heavy metal band of the '90s." In 1993, Robert Baird of Phoenix New Times wrote that the band played "machine-gun-tempo mayhem" and that the members "love to attack organized religion and repressive government."
A number of bands have cited Sepultura as an influence, including Slipknot, Korn, Hatebreed, Alien Weaponry, Krisiun, Gojira, Between the Buried and Me, Xibalba, Vein, Toxic Holocaust, Code Orange, Puya and Nails.
Band members
Current members
Paulo Jr. – bass, backing vocals (1984–present)
Andreas Kisser – lead guitar, backing vocals (1987–present), lead vocals (1996–1998)
Derrick Green – lead vocals (1998–present), additional rhythm guitar (1998–2005)
Eloy Casagrande – drums, percussion (2011–present)
Former members
Vocalists
Wagner Lamounier (1984–1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Rhythm guitarists
Cássio (1984)
Roberto UFO (1984)
Julio Cesar Vieira Franco (1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Lead guitarists
Max Cavalera (1984–1985)
Jairo Guedz (1985–1987)
Bassists
Roberto "Gato" Raffan (1984)
Drummers
Beto Pinga (1984)
Igor Cavalera (1984–2006)
Jean Dolabella (2006–2011)
Touring musicians
Silvio Golfetti – lead guitar (1991)
Guilherme Martin – drums (2005)
Roy Mayorga – drums (2006)
Amilcar Christófaro – drums (2011)
Kevin Foley – drums (2013)
Timeline
Discography
Morbid Visions (1986)
Schizophrenia (1987)
Beneath the Remains (1989)
Arise (1991)
Chaos A.D. (1993)
Roots (1996)
Against (1998)
Nation (2001)
Roorback (2003)
Dante XXI (2006)
A-Lex (2009)
Kairos (2011)
The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2013)
Machine Messiah (2017)
Quadra (2020)
Notes
References
Bibliography
Anonymous (May 2003). Beneath the Remains. In: A Megaton Hit Parade: The All-Time Thrash Top 20. Terrorizer No. 109, page 35.
Barcinski, André & Gomes, Silvio (1999). Sepultura: Toda a História. São Paulo: Ed. 34.
Colmatti, Andréa (1997). Sepultura: Igor Cavalera. Modern Drummer Brasil, 6, 18–26, 28–30.
Hinchliffe, James (December 2006). Beneath the Remains. In: Death Metal|The DM Top 40. Terrorizer No. 151, page 54.
Lemos, Anamaria (1993). Caos Desencanado. Bizz, 98, 40–45.
Schwarz, Paul (2005). Morbid Visions. In: The First Wave. Terrorizer, 128, 42.
Sepultura (1996). Roots. [CD]. New York, NY: Roadrunner Records. The 25th Anniversary Series (2-CD Reissue, 2005).
External links
Brazilian thrash metal musical groups
Brazilian death metal musical groups
Brazilian musical groups
Roadrunner Records artists
Musical groups established in 1984
Musical groups from Belo Horizonte
Alternative metal musical groups
Musical quartets
Groove metal musical groups
Brazilian heavy metal musical groups
Nuclear Blast artists
Articles which contain graphical timelines
1984 establishments in Brazil
| true |
[
"Pandemonium is the third studio album by Cavalera Conspiracy. The album was released October 31 in Europe, November 3 in the UK, and November 4, 2014 in North America.\n\nAlbum information\nDuring the writing of the album Max Cavalera almost considered naming the album \"Fuck That Groove\" because of how fast and brutal the songs ended up. In an interview with Loudwire, Max admitted to putting his brother Igor to the test, “It’s like trying to make him play fast like he’s 15-years-old … You’re gonna play fast the whole time and every time he was in a groove, I’d say, ‘Fuck the groove, get out of the groove and go back to fast.” \n\nA new song titled \"Bonzai Kamikaze\" was uploaded to Napalm's official SoundCloud in August. The song is about Japanese kamikaze pilots and their fervor to commit suicide for their country.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nCavalera Conspiracy\n Max Cavalera – vocals, rhythm guitar\n Igor Cavalera – drums, percussion\n Marc Rizzo – lead guitar\n Nate Newton – bass, co-lead vocals on \"The Crucible\"\nProduction\n Max Cavalera – production\n John W. Gray – recording, mixing\n Matt Turner – assistant engineering\n Joe Laporta – mastering\n\nCharts \n\nThe album has sold over 2,600 copies in the United States.\n\nReferences \n\n2014 albums\nCavalera Conspiracy albums\nNapalm Records albums",
"Point Blank is the only studio album by heavy metal band Nailbomb, released on March 8, 1994, by Roadrunner Records. The side project Nailbomb was started by Max Cavalera and Alex Newport in the mid-1990s. The first track \"Wasting Away\" appears in the 1995 film To Die For. The album cover is a female Vietcong member with a U.S. soldier's gun to her head. The album was played live in its entirety for the first time ever in 2017 by Max Cavalera with his band Soulfly, more than 20 years after the release of the album and the band's break up. However, Alex Newport was not part of these performances due to his busy schedule. Cavalera's son Zyon performed Newport's vocal and keyboard parts for the tour.\n\nTrack listing \nAll tracks written by Max Cavalera and Alex Newport unless noted.\n\nBonus track version \nA remastered version was released on February 24, 2004, with liner notes and extra tracks:\n\nSamples \n\"Guerrillas\" contains a sample of \"Procreation of the Wicked\" by Celtic Frost and a sample from the movie Salvador. \"Cockroaches\" contains a sample from the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. \"For Fucks Sake\" contains samples of GG Allin's last TV appearance on The Jane Whitney Show before his death in June 1993.\n\nPersonnel \nNailbomb\nMax Cavalera: vocals, rhythm guitar, bass, sampling (vocals credited as \"insults\")\nAlex Newport: vocals, lead guitar, bass, sampling (vocals credited as \"mouthful of hate\")\n\nAdditional personnel\nAndreas Kisser: lead guitar on tracks 2, 9 & 11\nIgor Cavalera: drums on tracks 1, 5, 7, 10, 12 & 13\nDino Cazares: rhythm guitar on track 3\n\nProduction\nProduced by Alex Newport and Max Cavalera\nRecorded by Otto Agnello\nMixed by Alex Newport\n\nReferences \n\nNailbomb albums\n1994 debut albums\nRoadrunner Records albums\nAlbums produced by Max Cavalera\nAlbums produced by Alex Newport"
] |
[
"Sepultura",
"Max Cavalera era",
"What was the Max Cavalera era?",
"Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil."
] |
C_80c1f49fa04b42edad75aebd7cc3b286_1
|
What is something interesting about this article?
| 2 |
What is something interesting about Sepultura and the Max Cavalera era?
|
Sepultura
|
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vania, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motorhead song "Dancing on Your Grave". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne and V8. They would travel to a record shop in Sao Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it: The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Megadeth, Exodus and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno and Dorsal Atlantica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcofago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist. CANNOTANSWER
|
". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin,
|
Sepultura (, "grave") is a Brazilian heavy metal band from Belo Horizonte. Formed in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the band was a major force in the groove metal, thrash metal and death metal genres during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their later experiments drawing influence from alternative metal, world music, nu metal, hardcore punk, and industrial metal. Sepultura has also been credited as one of the second wave of thrash metal acts from the late 1980s to early-to-mid-1990s.
The band has had several lineup changes throughout its existence, with Max and Igor Cavalera departing in 1996 and 2006, respectively. Sepultura's current lineup consists of vocalist Derrick Green (who replaced Max in 1998), guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Jr. and drummer Eloy Casagrande (who replaced Igor's successor Jean Dolabella in 2011). Since Igor Cavalera's departure in 2006, there have been no original members left in the band. Although Paulo Jr. joined Sepultura shortly after its formation in late 1984 and is the longest serving member, he did not play on any of the band's studio albums until Chaos A.D. (1993). Kisser, who replaced onetime guitarist Jairo Guedz, has appeared on all of Sepultura's records since their second full-length Schizophrenia (1987); he also recorded bass guitar until Chaos A.D..
Sepultura has released fifteen studio albums to date, the latest being Quadra (2020). Their most successful records are Beneath the Remains (1989), Arise (1991), Chaos A.D. (1993), and Roots (1996). Sepultura has sold over three million units in the United States and almost 20 million worldwide, gaining multiple gold and platinum records around the globe, including in countries as diverse as France, Australia, Indonesia, United States, Cyprus, and their native Brazil.
History
Formation, Bestial Devastation and Morbid Visions (1984–1986)
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vânia, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motörhead song "Dancing on Your Grave".
The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, and V8. They would travel to a record shop in São Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it:
The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Slayer, Megadeth, Exodus, and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno, and Dorsal Atlântica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcófago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist.
After about a year of performing, Sepultura signed to Cogumelo Records in 1985. Later that year, they released Bestial Devastation, a shared EP with fellow Brazilian band Overdose. It was recorded and self-produced in just two days. The band recorded their first full-length album, Morbid Visions, in August 1986. It contained their first hit, "Troops of Doom", which gained some media attention. The band then decided to relocate to the larger city of São Paulo.
Schizophrenia, Beneath the Remains, and Arise (1987–1992)
In early 1987, Jairo Guedz quit the band. Guedz was replaced by São Paulo-based guitarist Andreas Kisser, and they released their second studio album, Schizophrenia, later that year. The album reflected a stylistic change towards a more thrash metal-oriented sound, while still keeping the death metal elements of Morbid Visions. Schizophrenia was an improvement in production and performance, and became a minor critical sensation across Europe and America as a much sought-after import. The band sent tapes to the United States that made radio playlists at a time when they were struggling to book gigs, because club owners were afraid to book them due to their style. The band gained attention from Roadrunner Records who signed them and released Schizophrenia internationally before seeing the band perform in person.
During a May 2018 interview with teenyrockers.com, Kisser noted that Sepultura would not have been possible without family support, not only from his own family, but also from the families of Max and Igor, and Paulo Jr.
The band's third studio album, Beneath the Remains, was released in 1989. The album was recorded in a rustic studio in Rio de Janeiro while the band communicated through translators with the American producer Scott Burns. It was an immediate success and became known in thrash metal circles as a classic on the order of Slayer's Reign in Blood. It was hailed by Terrorizer magazine as one of the all-time top 20 thrash metal albums, as well as gaining a place in their all-time top 40 death metal records. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "The complete absence of filler here makes this one of the most essential death/thrash metal albums of all time." A long European and American tour furthered the band's reputation, despite the fact that they were still very limited English speakers. Sepultura's first live dates outside of Brazil were opening for Sodom on their Agent Orange tour in Europe; following this was Sepultura's first US show, which was held on October 31, 1989 at the Ritz in New York City, opening for Danish heavy metal band King Diamond. The band filmed its first video for the song "Inner Self", which received considerable airplay on MTV's Headbangers Ball, giving Sepultura their first exposure in North America. Touring in support of Beneath the Remains continued throughout much of 1990, including three shows in Brazil with Napalm Death, European dates with Mordred and a US tour with Obituary and Sadus.
In January 1991, Sepultura played for more than 100,000 people at the Rock in Rio II festival. The band relocated from their native Brazil to Phoenix, Arizona in 1990, obtained new management, and recorded the album Arise at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida. By the time the album was released in March 1991, the band had become one of the most critically praised thrash/death metal bands of the time. The first single "Dead Embryonic Cells" was a success, and the title track gained additional attention when its video was banned by MTV America due to its apocalyptic religious imagery; it did, however, get some airplay on Headbangers Ball as did the music videos for "Dead Embryonic Cells" and "Desperate Cry". Arise was critically acclaimed and their first to chart on the Billboard 200, reaching No. 119.
Sepultura toured relentlessly throughout 1991 and 1992 in support of Arise; its touring cycle began in May 1991 with a European trek with Sacred Reich and Heathen, followed by the New Titans on the Block tour in the US that included support from Sacred Reich, Napalm Death and Sick of It All. They also played with several other bands, including Slayer, Testament, Motörhead, Kreator, White Zombie, Type O Negative and Fudge Tunnel, and along with Alice in Chains, Sepultura supported Ozzy Osbourne on his No More Tears tour. Max Cavalera married the band's manager Gloria Bujnowski during this period. The Arise tour concluded in December 1992 with a US tour, where the band (along with Helmet) supported Ministry's Psalm 69 tour.
Chaos A.D., Nailbomb and Roots (1993–1996)
Sepultura's fifth album, Chaos A.D., was released in 1993. Supported by the singles "Refuse/Resist", "Territory" and "Slave New World", this was their only album to be released in North America by Epic Records, and the first of two albums by Sepultura to be certified gold there. It saw a departure from their death metal style, adding influences of groove metal, industrial and hardcore punk. While Chaos A.D. is not a death metal album, the album does include elements of thrash metal music. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and wrote that, "Chaos A.D. ranks as one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time." The band did a year-long tour in support of Chaos A.D., starting with a headlining European run with Paradise Lost, followed by a US tour with Fudge Tunnel, Fear Factory and Clutch. They were also one of the support acts (along with Biohazard and Prong) for Pantera's Far Beyond Driven tour in North America, and then opened for the Ramones in South America and toured Australia and New Zealand with Sacred Reich. By the time the Chaos A.D. tour ended in November 1994, Sepultura was one of the most successful heavy metal bands of the day.
Also in 1994, Max and Igor collaborated with Alex Newport of Fudge Tunnel to form Nailbomb. They released an even more industrial-oriented album, Point Blank the same year. The group performed only one full live gig at Dynamo Open Air in 1995, and the performance was released as Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide. Nailbomb was disbanded shortly afterwards.
Sepultura's sound change continued with their sixth album, Roots, which was released in 1996. On this album the band experimented with elements of the music of Brazil's indigenous peoples, and adopted a slower, down-tuned sound. The album was hailed as a modern-day heavy metal classic and a major influence on the then-nascent nu metal scene. AllMusic gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "Roots consolidates Sepultura's position as perhaps the most distinctive, original heavy metal band of the 1990s." In 1996, Sepultura performed "War (Guerra)" for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Departure of Max Cavalera, Derrick Green joins and Against (1996–2000)
In August 1996, Sepultura played on the Castle Donington Monsters of Rock main stage alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Biohazard, and Fear Factory. The band was suddenly a three-piece with Andreas Kisser taking over on lead vocals, after Max Cavalera left the concert site earlier in the day upon learning of the death of his stepson Dana Wells in a car accident. After Dana Wells' funeral was finished, Max returned and continued to tour with Sepultura. A few months after Wells' death, the band had a meeting with Max and said that they wanted to fire their manager Gloria Bujnowski, who was Max's wife and Dana's mother, and find new management. Their reasoning was that Bujnowski was giving preferential treatment to Max while neglecting the rest of the band. Max, who was still coming to terms with the death of Wells, felt betrayed by his bandmates for wanting to get rid of Bujnowski and abruptly quit the band. Max Cavalera's final performance with Sepultura was at Brixton Academy in England on December 16, 1996.
Following Max Cavalera's departure, the remaining members of Sepultura announced plans to find a new vocalist. Among those who auditioned were Chuck Billy of Testament, Phil Demmel of Machine Head and Vio-lence, Marc Grewe of Morgoth, Jorge Rosado of Merauder and a then-unknown Jason "Gong" Jones. American musician Derrick Green from Cleveland, Ohio, was selected as the band's new front-man. The first album with the new line-up was Against, which was released in 1998. The album was critically and commercially less successful than previous albums and sold considerably fewer copies than the debut album by Max Cavalera's new band Soulfly. In a retrospective review AllMusic gave the album 3 stars out of 5, stating that "there are enough flashes of the old Sepultura brilliance to suggest that great things are still to come".
Nation and Roorback (2001–2005)
The band's eighth album, Nation, released in 2001, sold poorly. It would be their last studio album with Roadrunner Records. AllMusic gives the album 3 stars out of 5 and said, "As Green scrapes the lining of his vocal chords through the brash, impassioned tracks, he's singing about more than just 'one nation, Sepulnation'; he's suggesting something bigger, something worth shouting about and fighting for." In an interview, Derrick Green said that, "Every song will be related to the idea of building this nation. We will have our own flags, our own anthem." A recording of Max Cavalera's last live show with Sepultura, titled Under a Pale Grey Sky, was released in 2002 by Roadrunner Records.
After recording Revolusongs, an EP of covers in 2002, the band released their ninth studio album, Roorback, in 2003. Despite receiving greater critical acclaim than its predecessors, sales remained low. It was their first album with SPV Records. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "if there are still any lingering doubts about the Green/Sepultura match, 2003's excellent Roorback should put them to rest for good. Green is passionate and focused throughout the album — he has no problem going that extra mile — and the writing is consistently strong." In 2005, the band played in Dubai for the annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival. In November of that year, a live double DVD/double CD package, Live in São Paulo, was released. This was the first official live album from the band.
Dante XXI, A-Lex, and departure of Igor Cavalera (2006–2010)
Sepultura's tenth album, Dante XXI, was released on March 14, 2006. It is a concept album based on Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Music videos were recorded for the songs "Convicted in Life" and "Ostia". AllMusic gave the album 3.5 stars out of 5 and said that, "Overall, Dante XXI is easily one of Sepultura's strongest releases to feature Green on vocals."
In a 2007 interview with Revolver magazine, Max Cavalera stated that he and Igor, both of whom having recently reconciled after a decade-long feud, would reunite with the original Sepultura lineup. There were also rumors that the reunited line up would play on the main stage at Ozzfest 2007. However, this was denied by Kisser and the reunion did not occur. Instead, Igor Cavalera left the band after the release of Dante XXI and was replaced by Brazilian drummer Jean Dolabella, leaving the band without any of its original members. After leaving Sepultura, Igor and Max formed Cavalera Conspiracy.
The band was one of the featured musical guests at the Latin Grammy Awards of 2008 on November 13. They performed a cover of "The Girl from Ipanema", and "We've Lost You" from the album A-Lex. The 9th annual Latin Grammy Awards ceremony was held at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas and aired on Univision. Sepultura also appeared in a successful ad campaign for Volkswagen motors commercial that aired nationally throughout Brazil in 2008. The spot said that "it's the first time you've seen Sepultura like this. And a Sedan like this one too". The Volkswagen TV spot shows Sepultura playing bossa nova, the opposite of its heavy metal style, to say that "you never saw something like this, as you never saw a car like the new Voyage."
Sepultura released the album A-Lex on January 26, 2009. This was the first Sepultura album to include neither of the Cavalera brothers, with bassist Paulo Jr. as the sole remaining member from the band's debut album. A-Lex is a concept album based on the book A Clockwork Orange. The album was recorded at Trama Studios in São Paulo, Brazil, with producer Stanley Soares. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "Personnel changes can have a very negative effect on a band, but Sepultura have maintained their vitality all these years – and that vitality is alive and well on the superb A-Lex." In the same year Andreas Kisser contributed his recipe for "Churrasco in Soy Sauce" to Hellbent for Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook, stating in the recipe that he prefers his meat "medium-rare". Sepultura supported Metallica on January 30 and 31, 2010, at Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil. The two concerts were attended by 100,000 people. The band filmed a concert DVD in 2010. Sepultura played at Kucukciftlik Park, Istanbul, on April 27, 2010. On August 8, 2010 visited the UK to play at the Hevy Music Festival near Folkestone.
Kairos and The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2010–2015)
On July 6, 2010, it was announced that Sepultura were signed with Nuclear Blast Records, and would release their first album for the label in 2011. The band confirmed that there would be no reunion of the classic lineup. By the end of 2010, the band began writing new material and entered the studio to begin recording their 12th album with producer Roy Z (Judas Priest, Halford, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, Helloween and Andre Matos). On March 1, 2011, Sepultura had completed recording their new album, entitled Kairos, which was released in June 2011.
The album includes cover versions of Ministry's "Just One Fix" and The Prodigy's "Firestarter", both of which are available as bonus tracks on various special-edition releases. Sepultura played on the Kairos World Tour and at Wacken Open Air 2011. Drummer Jean Dolabella left the band and was replaced by 20-year-old Eloy Casagrande in November 2011, who had already played in Brazilian heavy metal singer Andre Matos' solo band and in the Brazilian post-hardcore band Gloria. In November and December 2011 Sepultura participated the Thrashfest Classics 2011 tour alongside thrash metal bands like Exodus, Destruction, Heathen, and Mortal Sin.
In May 2012, guitarist Andreas Kisser told Metal Underground that Sepultura would soon "start working on something new with Eloy" and see if they could "get ready for new music early next year". In an interview at England's Bloodstock Open Air on August 10, 2012, Kisser revealed that Sepultura would be filming a live DVD with the French percussive group Les Tambours du Bronx. He also revealed that the band was "already thinking about new ideas" for their next album and would "have something new going on" in 2013.
On December 10, 2012, producer Ross Robinson, who produced Sepultura's Roots album, tweeted: "Oh, didn't mention.. Spoke to Andreas, it's on. My vision, smoke Roots" suggesting he would be producing the band's next album. This was later confirmed, as well as an announcement that the album would be co-produced by Steve Evetts. Former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo made a guest appearance on the album.
On January 25, 2013, it was announced that author Jason Korolenko was working on Relentless – 30 Years of Sepultura, which is described in a press release as "the only book-length biography to cover the band's entire 30-year career." Relentless was published on October 8, 2014 in Poland under the title Brazylijska Furia, and the English language edition was published via Rocket 88 on December 4, 2014. The Brazilian edition, titled Relentless – 30 Anos de Sepultura, is scheduled for publication via Benvira in early 2015. The French language edition of "Relentless" was published in France on October 19, 2015.
On July 19, 2013, it was revealed that the title of the band's thirteenth album was The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart. In September 2013, they performed at Rock in Rio with Brazilian rock/MPB artist Zé Ramalho – this line-up was named "Zépultura", a portmanteau of both artists' names.
Machine Messiah and Quadra (2016–present)
After spending more than two years of touring in support of The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart, Sepultura entered the studio in mid-2016 to begin recording their fourteenth studio album, with Jens Bogren as the producer. The resulting album, Machine Messiah, was released on January 13, 2017. Sepultura promoted the album with a series of world tours, including supporting Kreator on their Gods of Violence tour in Europe in February–March 2017, and along with Prong, they supported Testament on the latter's Brotherhood of the Snake tour in the United States in April–May 2017. The band also toured Europe in February and March 2018 with Obscura, Goatwhore and Fit for an Autopsy, and Australia in May with Death Angel.
The first official Sepultura documentary, Sepultura Endurance, was premiered in May 2017 and released on June 17. Max and Igor declined to be interviewed for the film and also refused to allow early material of the band to be used.
In an August 2018 interview at Wacken Open Air, Kisser confirmed that Sepultura had begun the songwriting process of their fifteenth studio album, and stated later that month that it was not expected to be released before 2020. The band began recording the album, again with producer Bogren, in August 2019 for a tentative February 2020 release.
In October 2019, during their performance at Rock in Rio 8, the band announced the name and revealed the cover for their fifteenth studio album, which would be named Quadra. They also played the lead single, named "Isolation", which is also the opening track for the album. On November 8, they released the studio version of "Isolation" and announced that Quadra would be released on February 7, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sepultura had not been able to tour or play any shows in support of Quadra for over two years after its release. They played their first show in two years at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro on February 12, 2022. The band will promote Quadra by touring the United States with Sacred Reich, Crowbar and Art of Shock, and Europe with the two-thirds of US leg (only Sacred Reich and Crowbar remaining); due to the COVID-19 situation, the tours had been rescheduled to two years from March and April 2020 and a year from the fall of 2021 respectively.
Sepultura released a quarantine collaboration album on August 13, 2021, titled SepulQuarta, which includes contributions by members of Megadeth, Testament, Anthrax, System of a Down, Trivium and Sacred Reich.
Musical style, influences, and legacy
Sepultura's early influences were heavy metal and hard rock groups such as Kiss, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Iron Maiden, Venom, Celtic Frost, Twisted Sister and Whitesnake, as well as thrash metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, Testament, Anthrax, Kreator, Sodom and Destruction and death metal bands Possessed and Death. They were also influenced by punk rock music, including bands such as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Discharge, S.O.D., Amebix and New Model Army. Andreas Kisser has affirmed that "without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible."
Sepultura's music comes in a wide range of heavy metal musical styles. The band has been described mainly as thrash metal and death metal, and considered one of the primary inventors of the latter genre. Another genre the band has been commonly categorized under is groove metal. The band later on started experimenting with elements of other musical genres such as hardcore punk, industrial metal, alternative metal, world music and nu metal.
Elements of Latin music, samba and Brazilian folk and tribal music have also been incorporated into Sepultura's metal style, particularly on Roots. Roots was partly recorded with the indigenous Xavante tribe in Mato Grosso, and incorporates percussion, rhythms, chanting and lyrical themes inspired by the collaboration.
Looking back on the band's career arc for a 2016 article on Max and Igor Cavalera's retrospective Return to Roots tour (in commemoration of the album's 20th anniversary), Nashville Scene contributor Saby Reyes-Kulkarni observed that "Before Chaos A.D., the overwhelming majority of metal had a 'white' feel to it. Sepultura changed that forever. And with Roots, the band went a step further, asserting once and for all that the genre can accommodate native stylings from any culture, much like jazz had done for decades prior."
MTV has called Sepultura the most successful Brazilian heavy metal band in history and "perhaps the most important heavy metal band of the '90s." In 1993, Robert Baird of Phoenix New Times wrote that the band played "machine-gun-tempo mayhem" and that the members "love to attack organized religion and repressive government."
A number of bands have cited Sepultura as an influence, including Slipknot, Korn, Hatebreed, Alien Weaponry, Krisiun, Gojira, Between the Buried and Me, Xibalba, Vein, Toxic Holocaust, Code Orange, Puya and Nails.
Band members
Current members
Paulo Jr. – bass, backing vocals (1984–present)
Andreas Kisser – lead guitar, backing vocals (1987–present), lead vocals (1996–1998)
Derrick Green – lead vocals (1998–present), additional rhythm guitar (1998–2005)
Eloy Casagrande – drums, percussion (2011–present)
Former members
Vocalists
Wagner Lamounier (1984–1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Rhythm guitarists
Cássio (1984)
Roberto UFO (1984)
Julio Cesar Vieira Franco (1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Lead guitarists
Max Cavalera (1984–1985)
Jairo Guedz (1985–1987)
Bassists
Roberto "Gato" Raffan (1984)
Drummers
Beto Pinga (1984)
Igor Cavalera (1984–2006)
Jean Dolabella (2006–2011)
Touring musicians
Silvio Golfetti – lead guitar (1991)
Guilherme Martin – drums (2005)
Roy Mayorga – drums (2006)
Amilcar Christófaro – drums (2011)
Kevin Foley – drums (2013)
Timeline
Discography
Morbid Visions (1986)
Schizophrenia (1987)
Beneath the Remains (1989)
Arise (1991)
Chaos A.D. (1993)
Roots (1996)
Against (1998)
Nation (2001)
Roorback (2003)
Dante XXI (2006)
A-Lex (2009)
Kairos (2011)
The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2013)
Machine Messiah (2017)
Quadra (2020)
Notes
References
Bibliography
Anonymous (May 2003). Beneath the Remains. In: A Megaton Hit Parade: The All-Time Thrash Top 20. Terrorizer No. 109, page 35.
Barcinski, André & Gomes, Silvio (1999). Sepultura: Toda a História. São Paulo: Ed. 34.
Colmatti, Andréa (1997). Sepultura: Igor Cavalera. Modern Drummer Brasil, 6, 18–26, 28–30.
Hinchliffe, James (December 2006). Beneath the Remains. In: Death Metal|The DM Top 40. Terrorizer No. 151, page 54.
Lemos, Anamaria (1993). Caos Desencanado. Bizz, 98, 40–45.
Schwarz, Paul (2005). Morbid Visions. In: The First Wave. Terrorizer, 128, 42.
Sepultura (1996). Roots. [CD]. New York, NY: Roadrunner Records. The 25th Anniversary Series (2-CD Reissue, 2005).
External links
Brazilian thrash metal musical groups
Brazilian death metal musical groups
Brazilian musical groups
Roadrunner Records artists
Musical groups established in 1984
Musical groups from Belo Horizonte
Alternative metal musical groups
Musical quartets
Groove metal musical groups
Brazilian heavy metal musical groups
Nuclear Blast artists
Articles which contain graphical timelines
1984 establishments in Brazil
| false |
[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Deem in law is used to treat something as if it were really something else or it has qualities it does not have.\n\nDeem has been traditionally considered to be a useful word when it is necessary to establish a legal fiction either positively by \"deeming\" something to be what it is not or negatively by \"deeming\" something not to be what it is. All other uses of the word should be avoided. Phrases\nlike “if he deems fit”, “as he deems necessary”, or “nothing in this Act shall be deemed to...” are objectionable as unnecessary deviations from common language. \"Thinks\" or \"considers\" are preferable in the first two examples and \"construed\" or \"interpreted\" in the third.\n\nExamples \nIn Article 10 of the Treaty of Taipei, the inhabitants of Taiwan and Penghu are deemed to be nationals of the Republic of China. On 27 May 1952, , who was the head of the and one of the participants of the negotiation of the drafting of the treaty, explained in the House of Councillors of Japan that, the purpose of Article 10 is to facilitate the inhabitants' traveling to other countries. Wajima further explained that because the future ownership of the territorial sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu are unclear, the inhabitants' nationalities would become unclear once they lose Japanese nationalities due to the two territories being renounced by Japan, causing their inconveniences when they are traveling to other countries. Therefore, according to Wajima, the Article makes the inhabitants of Taiwan and Penghu deemed to be nationals of the Republic of China and the purpose of the Article is not to define who the nationals of the Republic of China are.\n\nSee also \n\nDe jure\nDe facto\n\nReferences \n\nCommon law legal terminology"
] |
[
"Sepultura",
"Max Cavalera era",
"What was the Max Cavalera era?",
"Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil.",
"What is something interesting about this article?",
"\". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin,"
] |
C_80c1f49fa04b42edad75aebd7cc3b286_1
|
Who were their other influences?
| 3 |
Who were Sepultura's other influences besides Led Zeppelin?
|
Sepultura
|
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vania, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motorhead song "Dancing on Your Grave". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne and V8. They would travel to a record shop in Sao Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it: The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Megadeth, Exodus and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno and Dorsal Atlantica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcofago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist. CANNOTANSWER
|
Black Sabbath
|
Sepultura (, "grave") is a Brazilian heavy metal band from Belo Horizonte. Formed in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the band was a major force in the groove metal, thrash metal and death metal genres during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their later experiments drawing influence from alternative metal, world music, nu metal, hardcore punk, and industrial metal. Sepultura has also been credited as one of the second wave of thrash metal acts from the late 1980s to early-to-mid-1990s.
The band has had several lineup changes throughout its existence, with Max and Igor Cavalera departing in 1996 and 2006, respectively. Sepultura's current lineup consists of vocalist Derrick Green (who replaced Max in 1998), guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Jr. and drummer Eloy Casagrande (who replaced Igor's successor Jean Dolabella in 2011). Since Igor Cavalera's departure in 2006, there have been no original members left in the band. Although Paulo Jr. joined Sepultura shortly after its formation in late 1984 and is the longest serving member, he did not play on any of the band's studio albums until Chaos A.D. (1993). Kisser, who replaced onetime guitarist Jairo Guedz, has appeared on all of Sepultura's records since their second full-length Schizophrenia (1987); he also recorded bass guitar until Chaos A.D..
Sepultura has released fifteen studio albums to date, the latest being Quadra (2020). Their most successful records are Beneath the Remains (1989), Arise (1991), Chaos A.D. (1993), and Roots (1996). Sepultura has sold over three million units in the United States and almost 20 million worldwide, gaining multiple gold and platinum records around the globe, including in countries as diverse as France, Australia, Indonesia, United States, Cyprus, and their native Brazil.
History
Formation, Bestial Devastation and Morbid Visions (1984–1986)
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vânia, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motörhead song "Dancing on Your Grave".
The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, and V8. They would travel to a record shop in São Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it:
The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Slayer, Megadeth, Exodus, and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno, and Dorsal Atlântica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcófago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist.
After about a year of performing, Sepultura signed to Cogumelo Records in 1985. Later that year, they released Bestial Devastation, a shared EP with fellow Brazilian band Overdose. It was recorded and self-produced in just two days. The band recorded their first full-length album, Morbid Visions, in August 1986. It contained their first hit, "Troops of Doom", which gained some media attention. The band then decided to relocate to the larger city of São Paulo.
Schizophrenia, Beneath the Remains, and Arise (1987–1992)
In early 1987, Jairo Guedz quit the band. Guedz was replaced by São Paulo-based guitarist Andreas Kisser, and they released their second studio album, Schizophrenia, later that year. The album reflected a stylistic change towards a more thrash metal-oriented sound, while still keeping the death metal elements of Morbid Visions. Schizophrenia was an improvement in production and performance, and became a minor critical sensation across Europe and America as a much sought-after import. The band sent tapes to the United States that made radio playlists at a time when they were struggling to book gigs, because club owners were afraid to book them due to their style. The band gained attention from Roadrunner Records who signed them and released Schizophrenia internationally before seeing the band perform in person.
During a May 2018 interview with teenyrockers.com, Kisser noted that Sepultura would not have been possible without family support, not only from his own family, but also from the families of Max and Igor, and Paulo Jr.
The band's third studio album, Beneath the Remains, was released in 1989. The album was recorded in a rustic studio in Rio de Janeiro while the band communicated through translators with the American producer Scott Burns. It was an immediate success and became known in thrash metal circles as a classic on the order of Slayer's Reign in Blood. It was hailed by Terrorizer magazine as one of the all-time top 20 thrash metal albums, as well as gaining a place in their all-time top 40 death metal records. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "The complete absence of filler here makes this one of the most essential death/thrash metal albums of all time." A long European and American tour furthered the band's reputation, despite the fact that they were still very limited English speakers. Sepultura's first live dates outside of Brazil were opening for Sodom on their Agent Orange tour in Europe; following this was Sepultura's first US show, which was held on October 31, 1989 at the Ritz in New York City, opening for Danish heavy metal band King Diamond. The band filmed its first video for the song "Inner Self", which received considerable airplay on MTV's Headbangers Ball, giving Sepultura their first exposure in North America. Touring in support of Beneath the Remains continued throughout much of 1990, including three shows in Brazil with Napalm Death, European dates with Mordred and a US tour with Obituary and Sadus.
In January 1991, Sepultura played for more than 100,000 people at the Rock in Rio II festival. The band relocated from their native Brazil to Phoenix, Arizona in 1990, obtained new management, and recorded the album Arise at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida. By the time the album was released in March 1991, the band had become one of the most critically praised thrash/death metal bands of the time. The first single "Dead Embryonic Cells" was a success, and the title track gained additional attention when its video was banned by MTV America due to its apocalyptic religious imagery; it did, however, get some airplay on Headbangers Ball as did the music videos for "Dead Embryonic Cells" and "Desperate Cry". Arise was critically acclaimed and their first to chart on the Billboard 200, reaching No. 119.
Sepultura toured relentlessly throughout 1991 and 1992 in support of Arise; its touring cycle began in May 1991 with a European trek with Sacred Reich and Heathen, followed by the New Titans on the Block tour in the US that included support from Sacred Reich, Napalm Death and Sick of It All. They also played with several other bands, including Slayer, Testament, Motörhead, Kreator, White Zombie, Type O Negative and Fudge Tunnel, and along with Alice in Chains, Sepultura supported Ozzy Osbourne on his No More Tears tour. Max Cavalera married the band's manager Gloria Bujnowski during this period. The Arise tour concluded in December 1992 with a US tour, where the band (along with Helmet) supported Ministry's Psalm 69 tour.
Chaos A.D., Nailbomb and Roots (1993–1996)
Sepultura's fifth album, Chaos A.D., was released in 1993. Supported by the singles "Refuse/Resist", "Territory" and "Slave New World", this was their only album to be released in North America by Epic Records, and the first of two albums by Sepultura to be certified gold there. It saw a departure from their death metal style, adding influences of groove metal, industrial and hardcore punk. While Chaos A.D. is not a death metal album, the album does include elements of thrash metal music. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and wrote that, "Chaos A.D. ranks as one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time." The band did a year-long tour in support of Chaos A.D., starting with a headlining European run with Paradise Lost, followed by a US tour with Fudge Tunnel, Fear Factory and Clutch. They were also one of the support acts (along with Biohazard and Prong) for Pantera's Far Beyond Driven tour in North America, and then opened for the Ramones in South America and toured Australia and New Zealand with Sacred Reich. By the time the Chaos A.D. tour ended in November 1994, Sepultura was one of the most successful heavy metal bands of the day.
Also in 1994, Max and Igor collaborated with Alex Newport of Fudge Tunnel to form Nailbomb. They released an even more industrial-oriented album, Point Blank the same year. The group performed only one full live gig at Dynamo Open Air in 1995, and the performance was released as Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide. Nailbomb was disbanded shortly afterwards.
Sepultura's sound change continued with their sixth album, Roots, which was released in 1996. On this album the band experimented with elements of the music of Brazil's indigenous peoples, and adopted a slower, down-tuned sound. The album was hailed as a modern-day heavy metal classic and a major influence on the then-nascent nu metal scene. AllMusic gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "Roots consolidates Sepultura's position as perhaps the most distinctive, original heavy metal band of the 1990s." In 1996, Sepultura performed "War (Guerra)" for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Departure of Max Cavalera, Derrick Green joins and Against (1996–2000)
In August 1996, Sepultura played on the Castle Donington Monsters of Rock main stage alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Biohazard, and Fear Factory. The band was suddenly a three-piece with Andreas Kisser taking over on lead vocals, after Max Cavalera left the concert site earlier in the day upon learning of the death of his stepson Dana Wells in a car accident. After Dana Wells' funeral was finished, Max returned and continued to tour with Sepultura. A few months after Wells' death, the band had a meeting with Max and said that they wanted to fire their manager Gloria Bujnowski, who was Max's wife and Dana's mother, and find new management. Their reasoning was that Bujnowski was giving preferential treatment to Max while neglecting the rest of the band. Max, who was still coming to terms with the death of Wells, felt betrayed by his bandmates for wanting to get rid of Bujnowski and abruptly quit the band. Max Cavalera's final performance with Sepultura was at Brixton Academy in England on December 16, 1996.
Following Max Cavalera's departure, the remaining members of Sepultura announced plans to find a new vocalist. Among those who auditioned were Chuck Billy of Testament, Phil Demmel of Machine Head and Vio-lence, Marc Grewe of Morgoth, Jorge Rosado of Merauder and a then-unknown Jason "Gong" Jones. American musician Derrick Green from Cleveland, Ohio, was selected as the band's new front-man. The first album with the new line-up was Against, which was released in 1998. The album was critically and commercially less successful than previous albums and sold considerably fewer copies than the debut album by Max Cavalera's new band Soulfly. In a retrospective review AllMusic gave the album 3 stars out of 5, stating that "there are enough flashes of the old Sepultura brilliance to suggest that great things are still to come".
Nation and Roorback (2001–2005)
The band's eighth album, Nation, released in 2001, sold poorly. It would be their last studio album with Roadrunner Records. AllMusic gives the album 3 stars out of 5 and said, "As Green scrapes the lining of his vocal chords through the brash, impassioned tracks, he's singing about more than just 'one nation, Sepulnation'; he's suggesting something bigger, something worth shouting about and fighting for." In an interview, Derrick Green said that, "Every song will be related to the idea of building this nation. We will have our own flags, our own anthem." A recording of Max Cavalera's last live show with Sepultura, titled Under a Pale Grey Sky, was released in 2002 by Roadrunner Records.
After recording Revolusongs, an EP of covers in 2002, the band released their ninth studio album, Roorback, in 2003. Despite receiving greater critical acclaim than its predecessors, sales remained low. It was their first album with SPV Records. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "if there are still any lingering doubts about the Green/Sepultura match, 2003's excellent Roorback should put them to rest for good. Green is passionate and focused throughout the album — he has no problem going that extra mile — and the writing is consistently strong." In 2005, the band played in Dubai for the annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival. In November of that year, a live double DVD/double CD package, Live in São Paulo, was released. This was the first official live album from the band.
Dante XXI, A-Lex, and departure of Igor Cavalera (2006–2010)
Sepultura's tenth album, Dante XXI, was released on March 14, 2006. It is a concept album based on Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Music videos were recorded for the songs "Convicted in Life" and "Ostia". AllMusic gave the album 3.5 stars out of 5 and said that, "Overall, Dante XXI is easily one of Sepultura's strongest releases to feature Green on vocals."
In a 2007 interview with Revolver magazine, Max Cavalera stated that he and Igor, both of whom having recently reconciled after a decade-long feud, would reunite with the original Sepultura lineup. There were also rumors that the reunited line up would play on the main stage at Ozzfest 2007. However, this was denied by Kisser and the reunion did not occur. Instead, Igor Cavalera left the band after the release of Dante XXI and was replaced by Brazilian drummer Jean Dolabella, leaving the band without any of its original members. After leaving Sepultura, Igor and Max formed Cavalera Conspiracy.
The band was one of the featured musical guests at the Latin Grammy Awards of 2008 on November 13. They performed a cover of "The Girl from Ipanema", and "We've Lost You" from the album A-Lex. The 9th annual Latin Grammy Awards ceremony was held at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas and aired on Univision. Sepultura also appeared in a successful ad campaign for Volkswagen motors commercial that aired nationally throughout Brazil in 2008. The spot said that "it's the first time you've seen Sepultura like this. And a Sedan like this one too". The Volkswagen TV spot shows Sepultura playing bossa nova, the opposite of its heavy metal style, to say that "you never saw something like this, as you never saw a car like the new Voyage."
Sepultura released the album A-Lex on January 26, 2009. This was the first Sepultura album to include neither of the Cavalera brothers, with bassist Paulo Jr. as the sole remaining member from the band's debut album. A-Lex is a concept album based on the book A Clockwork Orange. The album was recorded at Trama Studios in São Paulo, Brazil, with producer Stanley Soares. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "Personnel changes can have a very negative effect on a band, but Sepultura have maintained their vitality all these years – and that vitality is alive and well on the superb A-Lex." In the same year Andreas Kisser contributed his recipe for "Churrasco in Soy Sauce" to Hellbent for Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook, stating in the recipe that he prefers his meat "medium-rare". Sepultura supported Metallica on January 30 and 31, 2010, at Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil. The two concerts were attended by 100,000 people. The band filmed a concert DVD in 2010. Sepultura played at Kucukciftlik Park, Istanbul, on April 27, 2010. On August 8, 2010 visited the UK to play at the Hevy Music Festival near Folkestone.
Kairos and The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2010–2015)
On July 6, 2010, it was announced that Sepultura were signed with Nuclear Blast Records, and would release their first album for the label in 2011. The band confirmed that there would be no reunion of the classic lineup. By the end of 2010, the band began writing new material and entered the studio to begin recording their 12th album with producer Roy Z (Judas Priest, Halford, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, Helloween and Andre Matos). On March 1, 2011, Sepultura had completed recording their new album, entitled Kairos, which was released in June 2011.
The album includes cover versions of Ministry's "Just One Fix" and The Prodigy's "Firestarter", both of which are available as bonus tracks on various special-edition releases. Sepultura played on the Kairos World Tour and at Wacken Open Air 2011. Drummer Jean Dolabella left the band and was replaced by 20-year-old Eloy Casagrande in November 2011, who had already played in Brazilian heavy metal singer Andre Matos' solo band and in the Brazilian post-hardcore band Gloria. In November and December 2011 Sepultura participated the Thrashfest Classics 2011 tour alongside thrash metal bands like Exodus, Destruction, Heathen, and Mortal Sin.
In May 2012, guitarist Andreas Kisser told Metal Underground that Sepultura would soon "start working on something new with Eloy" and see if they could "get ready for new music early next year". In an interview at England's Bloodstock Open Air on August 10, 2012, Kisser revealed that Sepultura would be filming a live DVD with the French percussive group Les Tambours du Bronx. He also revealed that the band was "already thinking about new ideas" for their next album and would "have something new going on" in 2013.
On December 10, 2012, producer Ross Robinson, who produced Sepultura's Roots album, tweeted: "Oh, didn't mention.. Spoke to Andreas, it's on. My vision, smoke Roots" suggesting he would be producing the band's next album. This was later confirmed, as well as an announcement that the album would be co-produced by Steve Evetts. Former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo made a guest appearance on the album.
On January 25, 2013, it was announced that author Jason Korolenko was working on Relentless – 30 Years of Sepultura, which is described in a press release as "the only book-length biography to cover the band's entire 30-year career." Relentless was published on October 8, 2014 in Poland under the title Brazylijska Furia, and the English language edition was published via Rocket 88 on December 4, 2014. The Brazilian edition, titled Relentless – 30 Anos de Sepultura, is scheduled for publication via Benvira in early 2015. The French language edition of "Relentless" was published in France on October 19, 2015.
On July 19, 2013, it was revealed that the title of the band's thirteenth album was The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart. In September 2013, they performed at Rock in Rio with Brazilian rock/MPB artist Zé Ramalho – this line-up was named "Zépultura", a portmanteau of both artists' names.
Machine Messiah and Quadra (2016–present)
After spending more than two years of touring in support of The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart, Sepultura entered the studio in mid-2016 to begin recording their fourteenth studio album, with Jens Bogren as the producer. The resulting album, Machine Messiah, was released on January 13, 2017. Sepultura promoted the album with a series of world tours, including supporting Kreator on their Gods of Violence tour in Europe in February–March 2017, and along with Prong, they supported Testament on the latter's Brotherhood of the Snake tour in the United States in April–May 2017. The band also toured Europe in February and March 2018 with Obscura, Goatwhore and Fit for an Autopsy, and Australia in May with Death Angel.
The first official Sepultura documentary, Sepultura Endurance, was premiered in May 2017 and released on June 17. Max and Igor declined to be interviewed for the film and also refused to allow early material of the band to be used.
In an August 2018 interview at Wacken Open Air, Kisser confirmed that Sepultura had begun the songwriting process of their fifteenth studio album, and stated later that month that it was not expected to be released before 2020. The band began recording the album, again with producer Bogren, in August 2019 for a tentative February 2020 release.
In October 2019, during their performance at Rock in Rio 8, the band announced the name and revealed the cover for their fifteenth studio album, which would be named Quadra. They also played the lead single, named "Isolation", which is also the opening track for the album. On November 8, they released the studio version of "Isolation" and announced that Quadra would be released on February 7, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sepultura had not been able to tour or play any shows in support of Quadra for over two years after its release. They played their first show in two years at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro on February 12, 2022. The band will promote Quadra by touring the United States with Sacred Reich, Crowbar and Art of Shock, and Europe with the two-thirds of US leg (only Sacred Reich and Crowbar remaining); due to the COVID-19 situation, the tours had been rescheduled to two years from March and April 2020 and a year from the fall of 2021 respectively.
Sepultura released a quarantine collaboration album on August 13, 2021, titled SepulQuarta, which includes contributions by members of Megadeth, Testament, Anthrax, System of a Down, Trivium and Sacred Reich.
Musical style, influences, and legacy
Sepultura's early influences were heavy metal and hard rock groups such as Kiss, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Iron Maiden, Venom, Celtic Frost, Twisted Sister and Whitesnake, as well as thrash metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, Testament, Anthrax, Kreator, Sodom and Destruction and death metal bands Possessed and Death. They were also influenced by punk rock music, including bands such as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Discharge, S.O.D., Amebix and New Model Army. Andreas Kisser has affirmed that "without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible."
Sepultura's music comes in a wide range of heavy metal musical styles. The band has been described mainly as thrash metal and death metal, and considered one of the primary inventors of the latter genre. Another genre the band has been commonly categorized under is groove metal. The band later on started experimenting with elements of other musical genres such as hardcore punk, industrial metal, alternative metal, world music and nu metal.
Elements of Latin music, samba and Brazilian folk and tribal music have also been incorporated into Sepultura's metal style, particularly on Roots. Roots was partly recorded with the indigenous Xavante tribe in Mato Grosso, and incorporates percussion, rhythms, chanting and lyrical themes inspired by the collaboration.
Looking back on the band's career arc for a 2016 article on Max and Igor Cavalera's retrospective Return to Roots tour (in commemoration of the album's 20th anniversary), Nashville Scene contributor Saby Reyes-Kulkarni observed that "Before Chaos A.D., the overwhelming majority of metal had a 'white' feel to it. Sepultura changed that forever. And with Roots, the band went a step further, asserting once and for all that the genre can accommodate native stylings from any culture, much like jazz had done for decades prior."
MTV has called Sepultura the most successful Brazilian heavy metal band in history and "perhaps the most important heavy metal band of the '90s." In 1993, Robert Baird of Phoenix New Times wrote that the band played "machine-gun-tempo mayhem" and that the members "love to attack organized religion and repressive government."
A number of bands have cited Sepultura as an influence, including Slipknot, Korn, Hatebreed, Alien Weaponry, Krisiun, Gojira, Between the Buried and Me, Xibalba, Vein, Toxic Holocaust, Code Orange, Puya and Nails.
Band members
Current members
Paulo Jr. – bass, backing vocals (1984–present)
Andreas Kisser – lead guitar, backing vocals (1987–present), lead vocals (1996–1998)
Derrick Green – lead vocals (1998–present), additional rhythm guitar (1998–2005)
Eloy Casagrande – drums, percussion (2011–present)
Former members
Vocalists
Wagner Lamounier (1984–1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Rhythm guitarists
Cássio (1984)
Roberto UFO (1984)
Julio Cesar Vieira Franco (1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Lead guitarists
Max Cavalera (1984–1985)
Jairo Guedz (1985–1987)
Bassists
Roberto "Gato" Raffan (1984)
Drummers
Beto Pinga (1984)
Igor Cavalera (1984–2006)
Jean Dolabella (2006–2011)
Touring musicians
Silvio Golfetti – lead guitar (1991)
Guilherme Martin – drums (2005)
Roy Mayorga – drums (2006)
Amilcar Christófaro – drums (2011)
Kevin Foley – drums (2013)
Timeline
Discography
Morbid Visions (1986)
Schizophrenia (1987)
Beneath the Remains (1989)
Arise (1991)
Chaos A.D. (1993)
Roots (1996)
Against (1998)
Nation (2001)
Roorback (2003)
Dante XXI (2006)
A-Lex (2009)
Kairos (2011)
The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2013)
Machine Messiah (2017)
Quadra (2020)
Notes
References
Bibliography
Anonymous (May 2003). Beneath the Remains. In: A Megaton Hit Parade: The All-Time Thrash Top 20. Terrorizer No. 109, page 35.
Barcinski, André & Gomes, Silvio (1999). Sepultura: Toda a História. São Paulo: Ed. 34.
Colmatti, Andréa (1997). Sepultura: Igor Cavalera. Modern Drummer Brasil, 6, 18–26, 28–30.
Hinchliffe, James (December 2006). Beneath the Remains. In: Death Metal|The DM Top 40. Terrorizer No. 151, page 54.
Lemos, Anamaria (1993). Caos Desencanado. Bizz, 98, 40–45.
Schwarz, Paul (2005). Morbid Visions. In: The First Wave. Terrorizer, 128, 42.
Sepultura (1996). Roots. [CD]. New York, NY: Roadrunner Records. The 25th Anniversary Series (2-CD Reissue, 2005).
External links
Brazilian thrash metal musical groups
Brazilian death metal musical groups
Brazilian musical groups
Roadrunner Records artists
Musical groups established in 1984
Musical groups from Belo Horizonte
Alternative metal musical groups
Musical quartets
Groove metal musical groups
Brazilian heavy metal musical groups
Nuclear Blast artists
Articles which contain graphical timelines
1984 establishments in Brazil
| true |
[
"The Edmund Fitzgerald (formerly known as Elizabeth) were a math rock band from Oxford, England, who disbanded in 2005. Their final line-up consisted of Yannis Philippakis on lead guitar and vocals, Lina Simon on rhythm guitar, and Jack Bevan on drums. Philippakis and Bevan later went on to join Foals.\n\nOverview\nThe band were known for their live shows that featured intense epic songs with minimal vocals and disjointed, technical rhythms. Influences included Sweep the Leg Johnny and Sonic Youth. However, other influences were so numerous and varied that the group drew from the ideas of other bands rather than their finished product.\n\nThe band split in 2005, following the departure of Simon, who chose not to pursue a musical career. They also claimed that things had become \"too serious\" and that they wanted to have more fun making music. This new desire resulted in the formation of Foals.\n\nDiscography\n\nReferences\n\nEnglish rock music groups\nMusic in Oxford\nMath rock groups\nMusical groups from Oxford",
"In mass communication, the Hierarchy of Influences, formally known as the Hierarchical Influences Model, is an organized theoretical framework introduced by Pamela Shoemaker & Stephen D. Reese. It comprises five levels of influence on media content from the macro to micro levels: social systems, social institutions, media organizations, routine practices, and individuals. This framework was introduced in their book Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content.\n\nFive levels of Hierarchy of Influences \n\nThe framework was proposed in response to what the scholars believed was an over-emphasis on media processes and effects research. The HOI model instead made the content produced by news media the dependent variable in research studies, influenced by factors located within the hierarchical framework. From a media sociology perspective, the framework \"takes into account the multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on media and suggests how influence at one level may interact with that at another.\" Whereas most media effects study treat media content as independent variable to understand how audience use media content and how they are influenced by media content, \"Hierarchy of Influences\" framework treats media content as dependent variable and five levels of influences as potential independent variables.\n\nOverall, the framework provides a way to understand the \"media and their links with culture, other organizations, and institutions.\"\n\nSocial systems \n\nThe macro social systems level is the outer-most ring of the model that represent the influences from social systems as a whole. This level focus on how ideological forces shape and influence media content. For this reason, it is often employed in cross-national comparative media studies.\n\nSocial institutions \n\nSocial institutional level describes influences coming from larger trans-organizational media field. How media organizations combine into larger institutions that become part of larger structured relationships that compete or depend on each other as powerful social institutions.\n\nMedia organizations \n\nMedia organization level is distinguished from routines as this level describes larger organizational and occupational context such as organizational policy, occupational roles, and how the media enterprise itself is structured.\n\nRoutine practices \n\nThe routines level has three sources of routines, which constrain and enable communicators in their work process: audiences, organizations, and suppliers of content. Journalists have developed routines from endless pattern of norms in response to common situations. This level is where Mr. Gates or gatekeeping (communication) theory is also applied in journalists' appearance\n\nIndividuals \n\nThe micro individual level is located at the center of the model. On this level, individual communicator's characteristics, on both personal and professional, influence media content. Individual's innate characteristics such as gender, race, religious and political background influence media content indirectly through shaping personal attitude and values (e.g. ethical values) as well as professional roles and education.\n\nResearch \n\nHierarchy of influences model has been employed as theoretical framework to explain different levels of influences on media content. Researchers have studied professionalism, journalistic roles, cross-national comparative journalistic roles, comparative media studies, and understanding news production to name a few of closely studies areas.\n\nThomas Hanitzsch took a similar approach to hierarchy of influences model in examining different levels of influences on journalists' reporting process in his Worlds of Journalism study. This study conducted interviews in 21 countries focusing on differences in journalism culture, influences and trust in public institutions.\n\nReferences \n\nMass media theories\nMedia studies"
] |
[
"Sepultura",
"Max Cavalera era",
"What was the Max Cavalera era?",
"Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil.",
"What is something interesting about this article?",
"\". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin,",
"Who were their other influences?",
"Black Sabbath"
] |
C_80c1f49fa04b42edad75aebd7cc3b286_1
|
What was one of their albums?
| 4 |
What was one of Sepultura's albums?
|
Sepultura
|
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vania, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motorhead song "Dancing on Your Grave". The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne and V8. They would travel to a record shop in Sao Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it: The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Megadeth, Exodus and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno and Dorsal Atlantica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcofago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Sepultura (, "grave") is a Brazilian heavy metal band from Belo Horizonte. Formed in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the band was a major force in the groove metal, thrash metal and death metal genres during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their later experiments drawing influence from alternative metal, world music, nu metal, hardcore punk, and industrial metal. Sepultura has also been credited as one of the second wave of thrash metal acts from the late 1980s to early-to-mid-1990s.
The band has had several lineup changes throughout its existence, with Max and Igor Cavalera departing in 1996 and 2006, respectively. Sepultura's current lineup consists of vocalist Derrick Green (who replaced Max in 1998), guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Jr. and drummer Eloy Casagrande (who replaced Igor's successor Jean Dolabella in 2011). Since Igor Cavalera's departure in 2006, there have been no original members left in the band. Although Paulo Jr. joined Sepultura shortly after its formation in late 1984 and is the longest serving member, he did not play on any of the band's studio albums until Chaos A.D. (1993). Kisser, who replaced onetime guitarist Jairo Guedz, has appeared on all of Sepultura's records since their second full-length Schizophrenia (1987); he also recorded bass guitar until Chaos A.D..
Sepultura has released fifteen studio albums to date, the latest being Quadra (2020). Their most successful records are Beneath the Remains (1989), Arise (1991), Chaos A.D. (1993), and Roots (1996). Sepultura has sold over three million units in the United States and almost 20 million worldwide, gaining multiple gold and platinum records around the globe, including in countries as diverse as France, Australia, Indonesia, United States, Cyprus, and their native Brazil.
History
Formation, Bestial Devastation and Morbid Visions (1984–1986)
Sepultura was formed in 1984 in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The band was founded by teen brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, the impoverished sons of Vânia, a model, and Graciliano, a well-to-do Italian diplomat whose fatal heart attack left his family in financial ruin. Graciliano's death deeply affected his sons, inspiring them to form a band after Max heard the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 the very same day. They chose the band name Sepultura, the Portuguese word for "grave", when Max translated the lyrics of the Motörhead song "Dancing on Your Grave".
The brothers' early influences included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, and metal and hard rock artists of the early 1980s, such as Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, and V8. They would travel to a record shop in São Paulo that mixed tapes of the latest records by American bands. Their listening habits changed dramatically after being introduced to Venom. As Igor Cavalera put it:
The Cavalera brothers started listening to bands such as Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Sodom, Slayer, Megadeth, Exodus, and Exciter. They also had influences on Brazilian metal from bands like Stress, Sagrado Inferno, and Dorsal Atlântica. By 1984, they had dropped out of school. After several early membership changes, Sepultura established a stable lineup of Max on guitar, Igor on drums, vocalist Wagner Lamounier, and bassist Paulo Jr. Lamounier departed in March 1985 after disagreements with the band, and moved on to become the leader of the pioneering Brazilian black metal band Sarcófago. After his departure, Max took over the vocal duties. Jairo Guedes was invited to join the band as lead guitarist.
After about a year of performing, Sepultura signed to Cogumelo Records in 1985. Later that year, they released Bestial Devastation, a shared EP with fellow Brazilian band Overdose. It was recorded and self-produced in just two days. The band recorded their first full-length album, Morbid Visions, in August 1986. It contained their first hit, "Troops of Doom", which gained some media attention. The band then decided to relocate to the larger city of São Paulo.
Schizophrenia, Beneath the Remains, and Arise (1987–1992)
In early 1987, Jairo Guedz quit the band. Guedz was replaced by São Paulo-based guitarist Andreas Kisser, and they released their second studio album, Schizophrenia, later that year. The album reflected a stylistic change towards a more thrash metal-oriented sound, while still keeping the death metal elements of Morbid Visions. Schizophrenia was an improvement in production and performance, and became a minor critical sensation across Europe and America as a much sought-after import. The band sent tapes to the United States that made radio playlists at a time when they were struggling to book gigs, because club owners were afraid to book them due to their style. The band gained attention from Roadrunner Records who signed them and released Schizophrenia internationally before seeing the band perform in person.
During a May 2018 interview with teenyrockers.com, Kisser noted that Sepultura would not have been possible without family support, not only from his own family, but also from the families of Max and Igor, and Paulo Jr.
The band's third studio album, Beneath the Remains, was released in 1989. The album was recorded in a rustic studio in Rio de Janeiro while the band communicated through translators with the American producer Scott Burns. It was an immediate success and became known in thrash metal circles as a classic on the order of Slayer's Reign in Blood. It was hailed by Terrorizer magazine as one of the all-time top 20 thrash metal albums, as well as gaining a place in their all-time top 40 death metal records. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "The complete absence of filler here makes this one of the most essential death/thrash metal albums of all time." A long European and American tour furthered the band's reputation, despite the fact that they were still very limited English speakers. Sepultura's first live dates outside of Brazil were opening for Sodom on their Agent Orange tour in Europe; following this was Sepultura's first US show, which was held on October 31, 1989 at the Ritz in New York City, opening for Danish heavy metal band King Diamond. The band filmed its first video for the song "Inner Self", which received considerable airplay on MTV's Headbangers Ball, giving Sepultura their first exposure in North America. Touring in support of Beneath the Remains continued throughout much of 1990, including three shows in Brazil with Napalm Death, European dates with Mordred and a US tour with Obituary and Sadus.
In January 1991, Sepultura played for more than 100,000 people at the Rock in Rio II festival. The band relocated from their native Brazil to Phoenix, Arizona in 1990, obtained new management, and recorded the album Arise at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida. By the time the album was released in March 1991, the band had become one of the most critically praised thrash/death metal bands of the time. The first single "Dead Embryonic Cells" was a success, and the title track gained additional attention when its video was banned by MTV America due to its apocalyptic religious imagery; it did, however, get some airplay on Headbangers Ball as did the music videos for "Dead Embryonic Cells" and "Desperate Cry". Arise was critically acclaimed and their first to chart on the Billboard 200, reaching No. 119.
Sepultura toured relentlessly throughout 1991 and 1992 in support of Arise; its touring cycle began in May 1991 with a European trek with Sacred Reich and Heathen, followed by the New Titans on the Block tour in the US that included support from Sacred Reich, Napalm Death and Sick of It All. They also played with several other bands, including Slayer, Testament, Motörhead, Kreator, White Zombie, Type O Negative and Fudge Tunnel, and along with Alice in Chains, Sepultura supported Ozzy Osbourne on his No More Tears tour. Max Cavalera married the band's manager Gloria Bujnowski during this period. The Arise tour concluded in December 1992 with a US tour, where the band (along with Helmet) supported Ministry's Psalm 69 tour.
Chaos A.D., Nailbomb and Roots (1993–1996)
Sepultura's fifth album, Chaos A.D., was released in 1993. Supported by the singles "Refuse/Resist", "Territory" and "Slave New World", this was their only album to be released in North America by Epic Records, and the first of two albums by Sepultura to be certified gold there. It saw a departure from their death metal style, adding influences of groove metal, industrial and hardcore punk. While Chaos A.D. is not a death metal album, the album does include elements of thrash metal music. AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and wrote that, "Chaos A.D. ranks as one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time." The band did a year-long tour in support of Chaos A.D., starting with a headlining European run with Paradise Lost, followed by a US tour with Fudge Tunnel, Fear Factory and Clutch. They were also one of the support acts (along with Biohazard and Prong) for Pantera's Far Beyond Driven tour in North America, and then opened for the Ramones in South America and toured Australia and New Zealand with Sacred Reich. By the time the Chaos A.D. tour ended in November 1994, Sepultura was one of the most successful heavy metal bands of the day.
Also in 1994, Max and Igor collaborated with Alex Newport of Fudge Tunnel to form Nailbomb. They released an even more industrial-oriented album, Point Blank the same year. The group performed only one full live gig at Dynamo Open Air in 1995, and the performance was released as Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide. Nailbomb was disbanded shortly afterwards.
Sepultura's sound change continued with their sixth album, Roots, which was released in 1996. On this album the band experimented with elements of the music of Brazil's indigenous peoples, and adopted a slower, down-tuned sound. The album was hailed as a modern-day heavy metal classic and a major influence on the then-nascent nu metal scene. AllMusic gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 and said, "Roots consolidates Sepultura's position as perhaps the most distinctive, original heavy metal band of the 1990s." In 1996, Sepultura performed "War (Guerra)" for the AIDS benefit album Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin produced by the Red Hot Organization.
Departure of Max Cavalera, Derrick Green joins and Against (1996–2000)
In August 1996, Sepultura played on the Castle Donington Monsters of Rock main stage alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Biohazard, and Fear Factory. The band was suddenly a three-piece with Andreas Kisser taking over on lead vocals, after Max Cavalera left the concert site earlier in the day upon learning of the death of his stepson Dana Wells in a car accident. After Dana Wells' funeral was finished, Max returned and continued to tour with Sepultura. A few months after Wells' death, the band had a meeting with Max and said that they wanted to fire their manager Gloria Bujnowski, who was Max's wife and Dana's mother, and find new management. Their reasoning was that Bujnowski was giving preferential treatment to Max while neglecting the rest of the band. Max, who was still coming to terms with the death of Wells, felt betrayed by his bandmates for wanting to get rid of Bujnowski and abruptly quit the band. Max Cavalera's final performance with Sepultura was at Brixton Academy in England on December 16, 1996.
Following Max Cavalera's departure, the remaining members of Sepultura announced plans to find a new vocalist. Among those who auditioned were Chuck Billy of Testament, Phil Demmel of Machine Head and Vio-lence, Marc Grewe of Morgoth, Jorge Rosado of Merauder and a then-unknown Jason "Gong" Jones. American musician Derrick Green from Cleveland, Ohio, was selected as the band's new front-man. The first album with the new line-up was Against, which was released in 1998. The album was critically and commercially less successful than previous albums and sold considerably fewer copies than the debut album by Max Cavalera's new band Soulfly. In a retrospective review AllMusic gave the album 3 stars out of 5, stating that "there are enough flashes of the old Sepultura brilliance to suggest that great things are still to come".
Nation and Roorback (2001–2005)
The band's eighth album, Nation, released in 2001, sold poorly. It would be their last studio album with Roadrunner Records. AllMusic gives the album 3 stars out of 5 and said, "As Green scrapes the lining of his vocal chords through the brash, impassioned tracks, he's singing about more than just 'one nation, Sepulnation'; he's suggesting something bigger, something worth shouting about and fighting for." In an interview, Derrick Green said that, "Every song will be related to the idea of building this nation. We will have our own flags, our own anthem." A recording of Max Cavalera's last live show with Sepultura, titled Under a Pale Grey Sky, was released in 2002 by Roadrunner Records.
After recording Revolusongs, an EP of covers in 2002, the band released their ninth studio album, Roorback, in 2003. Despite receiving greater critical acclaim than its predecessors, sales remained low. It was their first album with SPV Records. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "if there are still any lingering doubts about the Green/Sepultura match, 2003's excellent Roorback should put them to rest for good. Green is passionate and focused throughout the album — he has no problem going that extra mile — and the writing is consistently strong." In 2005, the band played in Dubai for the annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival. In November of that year, a live double DVD/double CD package, Live in São Paulo, was released. This was the first official live album from the band.
Dante XXI, A-Lex, and departure of Igor Cavalera (2006–2010)
Sepultura's tenth album, Dante XXI, was released on March 14, 2006. It is a concept album based on Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Music videos were recorded for the songs "Convicted in Life" and "Ostia". AllMusic gave the album 3.5 stars out of 5 and said that, "Overall, Dante XXI is easily one of Sepultura's strongest releases to feature Green on vocals."
In a 2007 interview with Revolver magazine, Max Cavalera stated that he and Igor, both of whom having recently reconciled after a decade-long feud, would reunite with the original Sepultura lineup. There were also rumors that the reunited line up would play on the main stage at Ozzfest 2007. However, this was denied by Kisser and the reunion did not occur. Instead, Igor Cavalera left the band after the release of Dante XXI and was replaced by Brazilian drummer Jean Dolabella, leaving the band without any of its original members. After leaving Sepultura, Igor and Max formed Cavalera Conspiracy.
The band was one of the featured musical guests at the Latin Grammy Awards of 2008 on November 13. They performed a cover of "The Girl from Ipanema", and "We've Lost You" from the album A-Lex. The 9th annual Latin Grammy Awards ceremony was held at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas and aired on Univision. Sepultura also appeared in a successful ad campaign for Volkswagen motors commercial that aired nationally throughout Brazil in 2008. The spot said that "it's the first time you've seen Sepultura like this. And a Sedan like this one too". The Volkswagen TV spot shows Sepultura playing bossa nova, the opposite of its heavy metal style, to say that "you never saw something like this, as you never saw a car like the new Voyage."
Sepultura released the album A-Lex on January 26, 2009. This was the first Sepultura album to include neither of the Cavalera brothers, with bassist Paulo Jr. as the sole remaining member from the band's debut album. A-Lex is a concept album based on the book A Clockwork Orange. The album was recorded at Trama Studios in São Paulo, Brazil, with producer Stanley Soares. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5 and said, "Personnel changes can have a very negative effect on a band, but Sepultura have maintained their vitality all these years – and that vitality is alive and well on the superb A-Lex." In the same year Andreas Kisser contributed his recipe for "Churrasco in Soy Sauce" to Hellbent for Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook, stating in the recipe that he prefers his meat "medium-rare". Sepultura supported Metallica on January 30 and 31, 2010, at Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil. The two concerts were attended by 100,000 people. The band filmed a concert DVD in 2010. Sepultura played at Kucukciftlik Park, Istanbul, on April 27, 2010. On August 8, 2010 visited the UK to play at the Hevy Music Festival near Folkestone.
Kairos and The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2010–2015)
On July 6, 2010, it was announced that Sepultura were signed with Nuclear Blast Records, and would release their first album for the label in 2011. The band confirmed that there would be no reunion of the classic lineup. By the end of 2010, the band began writing new material and entered the studio to begin recording their 12th album with producer Roy Z (Judas Priest, Halford, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson, Helloween and Andre Matos). On March 1, 2011, Sepultura had completed recording their new album, entitled Kairos, which was released in June 2011.
The album includes cover versions of Ministry's "Just One Fix" and The Prodigy's "Firestarter", both of which are available as bonus tracks on various special-edition releases. Sepultura played on the Kairos World Tour and at Wacken Open Air 2011. Drummer Jean Dolabella left the band and was replaced by 20-year-old Eloy Casagrande in November 2011, who had already played in Brazilian heavy metal singer Andre Matos' solo band and in the Brazilian post-hardcore band Gloria. In November and December 2011 Sepultura participated the Thrashfest Classics 2011 tour alongside thrash metal bands like Exodus, Destruction, Heathen, and Mortal Sin.
In May 2012, guitarist Andreas Kisser told Metal Underground that Sepultura would soon "start working on something new with Eloy" and see if they could "get ready for new music early next year". In an interview at England's Bloodstock Open Air on August 10, 2012, Kisser revealed that Sepultura would be filming a live DVD with the French percussive group Les Tambours du Bronx. He also revealed that the band was "already thinking about new ideas" for their next album and would "have something new going on" in 2013.
On December 10, 2012, producer Ross Robinson, who produced Sepultura's Roots album, tweeted: "Oh, didn't mention.. Spoke to Andreas, it's on. My vision, smoke Roots" suggesting he would be producing the band's next album. This was later confirmed, as well as an announcement that the album would be co-produced by Steve Evetts. Former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo made a guest appearance on the album.
On January 25, 2013, it was announced that author Jason Korolenko was working on Relentless – 30 Years of Sepultura, which is described in a press release as "the only book-length biography to cover the band's entire 30-year career." Relentless was published on October 8, 2014 in Poland under the title Brazylijska Furia, and the English language edition was published via Rocket 88 on December 4, 2014. The Brazilian edition, titled Relentless – 30 Anos de Sepultura, is scheduled for publication via Benvira in early 2015. The French language edition of "Relentless" was published in France on October 19, 2015.
On July 19, 2013, it was revealed that the title of the band's thirteenth album was The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart. In September 2013, they performed at Rock in Rio with Brazilian rock/MPB artist Zé Ramalho – this line-up was named "Zépultura", a portmanteau of both artists' names.
Machine Messiah and Quadra (2016–present)
After spending more than two years of touring in support of The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart, Sepultura entered the studio in mid-2016 to begin recording their fourteenth studio album, with Jens Bogren as the producer. The resulting album, Machine Messiah, was released on January 13, 2017. Sepultura promoted the album with a series of world tours, including supporting Kreator on their Gods of Violence tour in Europe in February–March 2017, and along with Prong, they supported Testament on the latter's Brotherhood of the Snake tour in the United States in April–May 2017. The band also toured Europe in February and March 2018 with Obscura, Goatwhore and Fit for an Autopsy, and Australia in May with Death Angel.
The first official Sepultura documentary, Sepultura Endurance, was premiered in May 2017 and released on June 17. Max and Igor declined to be interviewed for the film and also refused to allow early material of the band to be used.
In an August 2018 interview at Wacken Open Air, Kisser confirmed that Sepultura had begun the songwriting process of their fifteenth studio album, and stated later that month that it was not expected to be released before 2020. The band began recording the album, again with producer Bogren, in August 2019 for a tentative February 2020 release.
In October 2019, during their performance at Rock in Rio 8, the band announced the name and revealed the cover for their fifteenth studio album, which would be named Quadra. They also played the lead single, named "Isolation", which is also the opening track for the album. On November 8, they released the studio version of "Isolation" and announced that Quadra would be released on February 7, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sepultura had not been able to tour or play any shows in support of Quadra for over two years after its release. They played their first show in two years at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro on February 12, 2022. The band will promote Quadra by touring the United States with Sacred Reich, Crowbar and Art of Shock, and Europe with the two-thirds of US leg (only Sacred Reich and Crowbar remaining); due to the COVID-19 situation, the tours had been rescheduled to two years from March and April 2020 and a year from the fall of 2021 respectively.
Sepultura released a quarantine collaboration album on August 13, 2021, titled SepulQuarta, which includes contributions by members of Megadeth, Testament, Anthrax, System of a Down, Trivium and Sacred Reich.
Musical style, influences, and legacy
Sepultura's early influences were heavy metal and hard rock groups such as Kiss, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Iron Maiden, Venom, Celtic Frost, Twisted Sister and Whitesnake, as well as thrash metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, Testament, Anthrax, Kreator, Sodom and Destruction and death metal bands Possessed and Death. They were also influenced by punk rock music, including bands such as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Discharge, S.O.D., Amebix and New Model Army. Andreas Kisser has affirmed that "without Slayer, Sepultura would never be possible."
Sepultura's music comes in a wide range of heavy metal musical styles. The band has been described mainly as thrash metal and death metal, and considered one of the primary inventors of the latter genre. Another genre the band has been commonly categorized under is groove metal. The band later on started experimenting with elements of other musical genres such as hardcore punk, industrial metal, alternative metal, world music and nu metal.
Elements of Latin music, samba and Brazilian folk and tribal music have also been incorporated into Sepultura's metal style, particularly on Roots. Roots was partly recorded with the indigenous Xavante tribe in Mato Grosso, and incorporates percussion, rhythms, chanting and lyrical themes inspired by the collaboration.
Looking back on the band's career arc for a 2016 article on Max and Igor Cavalera's retrospective Return to Roots tour (in commemoration of the album's 20th anniversary), Nashville Scene contributor Saby Reyes-Kulkarni observed that "Before Chaos A.D., the overwhelming majority of metal had a 'white' feel to it. Sepultura changed that forever. And with Roots, the band went a step further, asserting once and for all that the genre can accommodate native stylings from any culture, much like jazz had done for decades prior."
MTV has called Sepultura the most successful Brazilian heavy metal band in history and "perhaps the most important heavy metal band of the '90s." In 1993, Robert Baird of Phoenix New Times wrote that the band played "machine-gun-tempo mayhem" and that the members "love to attack organized religion and repressive government."
A number of bands have cited Sepultura as an influence, including Slipknot, Korn, Hatebreed, Alien Weaponry, Krisiun, Gojira, Between the Buried and Me, Xibalba, Vein, Toxic Holocaust, Code Orange, Puya and Nails.
Band members
Current members
Paulo Jr. – bass, backing vocals (1984–present)
Andreas Kisser – lead guitar, backing vocals (1987–present), lead vocals (1996–1998)
Derrick Green – lead vocals (1998–present), additional rhythm guitar (1998–2005)
Eloy Casagrande – drums, percussion (2011–present)
Former members
Vocalists
Wagner Lamounier (1984–1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Rhythm guitarists
Cássio (1984)
Roberto UFO (1984)
Julio Cesar Vieira Franco (1985)
Max Cavalera (1985–1996)
Lead guitarists
Max Cavalera (1984–1985)
Jairo Guedz (1985–1987)
Bassists
Roberto "Gato" Raffan (1984)
Drummers
Beto Pinga (1984)
Igor Cavalera (1984–2006)
Jean Dolabella (2006–2011)
Touring musicians
Silvio Golfetti – lead guitar (1991)
Guilherme Martin – drums (2005)
Roy Mayorga – drums (2006)
Amilcar Christófaro – drums (2011)
Kevin Foley – drums (2013)
Timeline
Discography
Morbid Visions (1986)
Schizophrenia (1987)
Beneath the Remains (1989)
Arise (1991)
Chaos A.D. (1993)
Roots (1996)
Against (1998)
Nation (2001)
Roorback (2003)
Dante XXI (2006)
A-Lex (2009)
Kairos (2011)
The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart (2013)
Machine Messiah (2017)
Quadra (2020)
Notes
References
Bibliography
Anonymous (May 2003). Beneath the Remains. In: A Megaton Hit Parade: The All-Time Thrash Top 20. Terrorizer No. 109, page 35.
Barcinski, André & Gomes, Silvio (1999). Sepultura: Toda a História. São Paulo: Ed. 34.
Colmatti, Andréa (1997). Sepultura: Igor Cavalera. Modern Drummer Brasil, 6, 18–26, 28–30.
Hinchliffe, James (December 2006). Beneath the Remains. In: Death Metal|The DM Top 40. Terrorizer No. 151, page 54.
Lemos, Anamaria (1993). Caos Desencanado. Bizz, 98, 40–45.
Schwarz, Paul (2005). Morbid Visions. In: The First Wave. Terrorizer, 128, 42.
Sepultura (1996). Roots. [CD]. New York, NY: Roadrunner Records. The 25th Anniversary Series (2-CD Reissue, 2005).
External links
Brazilian thrash metal musical groups
Brazilian death metal musical groups
Brazilian musical groups
Roadrunner Records artists
Musical groups established in 1984
Musical groups from Belo Horizonte
Alternative metal musical groups
Musical quartets
Groove metal musical groups
Brazilian heavy metal musical groups
Nuclear Blast artists
Articles which contain graphical timelines
1984 establishments in Brazil
| false |
[
"The albums discography of South Korean girl group Twice consists of six studio albums, four compilation albums, one reissue studio album, eleven extended plays (EPs), including one compilation EP and three reissue EPs. \n\nFormed by JYP Entertainment in 2015 through the survival show Sixteen, Twice debuted in October 2015 with the release of their first EP, The Story Begins. Twice's second EP, Page Two was released in April 2016. In October 2016, the group released their third EP, Twicecoaster: Lane 1. The EP became one of the best-selling albums by a girl group in the history of Gaon Album Chart, with about 475,000 copies sold as of March 2020. Its reissue, Twicecoaster: Lane 2, was released in February 2017 and the group's fourth Korean EP, Signal, was later released in May. In October, their debut studio album, Twicetagram and its lead single debuted at number-one on the Billboard World Albums chart and World Digital Song Sales chart, respectively, becoming the first female Korean act to top both charts simultaneously. The album was subsequently reissued as Merry & Happy in December. The former three releases became the top three best-selling albums by a girl group in 2017.\n\nIn 2018, the group released their fifth Korean EP, What Is Love?, in April, and was reissued as Summer Nights in July. Yes or Yes, their sixth Korean EP, followed in November, with a reissue titled as The Year of \"Yes\" in December. The group maintained their best-selling girl group of the year status. Selling over 250,000 copies, What Is Love?, Summer Nights and Yes or Yes each earned a platinum certification from the Korea Music Content Association (KMCA).\n\nIn 2019, the group's seventh and eighth Korean EP, Fancy You and Feel Special, were released in April and September, respectively. After signing with Republic Records, their ninth Korean EP, More & More, was certified 2× platinum by the KMCA for selling over 500,000 copies. The group also entered the Billboard 200 at number 200, becoming the fifth Korean girl group to do so. Twice's second Korean studio album and fourth overall, Eyes Wide Open, charted at number-seventy two, making Twice the third K-pop girl group to enter the top 100 of the chart.\n\nIn 2021, Twice's tenth Korean EP, Taste of Love, peaked at number one on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart, making it the first EP from a girl group to do so. It was also the first EP from a girl group to enter the top 10 of the Billboard 200. Their third Korean studio album, Formula of Love: O+T=<3, was released in November 2021. The album peaked at position 3 on the Billboard 200 and was certified 2× platinum by the KMCA in January 2022.\n\nIn Japan, Twice debuted in June 2017 with their first Japanese compilation album, #Twice, earning their first platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ). The group's first Japanese studio album, BDZ, was released in 2018 and was later platinum-certified. The repackaged edition of the album was released in December 2018. In 2019, their second Japanese compilation album, #Twice2, was released in March and is platinum-certified by the RIAJ. In November of the same year, they released their second Japanese album, &Twice. In 2020, a repackage of &Twice was released on February 5. Later in September, their third Japanese compilation album, #Twice3, was released and became their seventh number 1 album on the Oricon Albums Chart, making Twice the second foreign female artist to achieve the feat. In July 2021, their third Japanese studio album, Perfect World, was released.\n\nTo date, Twice have earned ten number-one albums in South Korea, seven number-one albums on Japan's Oricon Albums Chart and five number-one albums on the Billboard Japan Hot Albums. The group is the highest-selling girl group in South Korea, with over 7.2 million albums sold. They have sold over 10 million albums in South Korea and Japan, cumulatively.\n\nAlbums\n\nStudio albums\n\nCompilation albums\n\nReissue albums\n\nExtended plays\n\nCompilation extended plays\n\nReissue extended plays\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n\n \nDiscographies of South Korean artists\nPop music group discographies",
"What the Future Holds Pt. 2 is the seventh studio album by the British group Steps. The album was released on 10 September 2021 by BMG Rights Management.\n\nBackground\nIn April 2021, Steps announced what was intended to be a deluxe edition of What the Future Holds would now be released as their seventh studio album, What the Future Holds Pt.2. Claire Richards said of the new record, \"we see What the Future Holds Pt. 2 as the perfect companion piece to the original album. The new record is classic Steps but also explores some brand-new sounds.\"\n\nSingles\nThe first single was confirmed as \"Heartbreak in This City\" remix featuring singer and television personality Michelle Visage. It debuted on BBC Radio 2 on 25 February, and made available to stream/download that same day. The single debuted at number 25 on the Official Singles Sales Chart.\n\n\"Take Me for a Ride\" was released on 29 July 2021 as the album's second single. \n\nA cover of \"The Slightest Touch\" was released on 20 August 2021 as the album's third single.\n\nIn November 2021 and during opening night of the arena tour, Lee Latchford-Evans confirmed \"A Hundred Years of Winter\" was the next single. It was released on 19 November 2021.\n\nCommercial performance\nWhat the Future Holds Pt. 2 debuted at number 2 in the UK Albums Charts with 25,000 units sold, only 2,000 copies behind Manic Street Preachers' The Ultra Vivid Lament. This was the second time the two groups competed for number-one position, after their albums This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours and Step One also charted at number 1 and 2, respectively, way back in 1998. This marks Steps' third consecutive number 2 studio album since their reunion in 2012, next to Tears on the Dancefloor and What the Future Holds Pt. 1. \n\nIn Australia, the album debuted at number 11, Steps' highest peak in the country in 23 years, since their debut album Step One peaked at number 5 in 1998.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\n2021 albums\nSteps (group) albums\nPop albums by British artists"
] |
[
"Nancy Lieberman",
"Early years"
] |
C_b4dc60e4f5dc46bf8f87d5ea86e9aefd_1
|
Where did Nancy grow up?
| 1 |
Where did Nancy Lieberman grow up?
|
Nancy Lieberman
|
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1, 1958, to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She was raised Jewish, but has become a born-again Christian. Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore. While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of only 12 slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where she brought home a gold medal Lieberman's mother, Renee, was not supportive of her daughter's passion for basketball. During one instance when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors, because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Nancy then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs. During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an AAU team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles. CANNOTANSWER
|
Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York
|
Nancy Elizabeth Lieberman (born July 1, 1958), nicknamed "Lady Magic", is an American former professional basketball player and coach in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) who is currently a broadcaster for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the head coach of Power, a team in the BIG3 which she led to its 2018 Championship. Lieberman is regarded as one of the greatest figures in American women's basketball.
In 2000, she was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame. Lieberman is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Early life
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She is Jewish (and described herself as "just a poor, skinny, redheaded Jewish girl from Queens"). Her family lived in Brooklyn when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. She lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust, and her paternal grandparents, who survived, had concentration camp numbers on their wrists.
Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
Lieberman's mother Renee was not supportive of her daughter's interest in basketball. Once, when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Lieberman then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs.
Playing career
High school career
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of the 12 coveted slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, while still in her teens, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where the team won a gold medal.
During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an Amateur Athletic Union team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles.
She told former Knick Walt Frazier that he was her hero and that it was because of him that she wore No. 10, saying: "You might not even know this, but you thought you were affecting young guys but you were affecting young, white Jewish women, not just boys."
College career
From 1976 to 1980, Lieberman attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and played on the women's basketball team there. During that time, she and her team won two consecutive AIAW National Championships (1979, 1980) and one WNIT (Women's National Invitation Tournament) Championship in 1978. She was the first two-time winner of the prestigious Wade Trophy, a national player of the year award in college women's basketball, and was selected as the Broderick Award winner for basketball as the top women's player in America. Lieberman also won three consecutive Kodak All-America awards (1978, '79, '80). Lieberman was one of six young adults to win the Young American Award from the Boy Scouts of America in 1980.
Lieberman earned the nickname "Lady Magic," a nod to Earvin "Magic" Johnson of NBA fame. Lieberman set a school record for career assists (961) that still stands today. She led the team in assists each of the four years she was on the team—in her sophomore year she averaged 8.9 per game. Lieberman amassed 2,430 points along with 1,167 rebounds in her collegiate career, producing an average of 18.1 points per game. Lieberman achieved a triple double (40 points, 15 rebounds, 11 assists) against Norfolk State in her sophomore year. Lieberman stole the ball 562 times and assisted a basket 961 times in her college career, believed to be modern records. She is the holder of several single-game and single-season records, including best free-throw shooting percentage in her freshman and sophomore years.
Lieberman earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University on May 6, 1980. She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
Professional career
In 1980 she was selected with the first pick in the Women's Pro Basketball League (WPBL) draft by the Dallas Diamonds. She helped Dallas to the 1981 WPBL finals, where they lost to the Nebraska Wranglers in five games. She was named the "rookie of the year", after averaging 26.3 points per game. Lieberman's WBL career is featured in the book Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978–1981.
In 1981, she played for the Los Angeles Lakers Summer Pro League team.
In 1984, she once again suited up for the Dallas Diamonds, signing a three-year, $250,000 contract with the team to play in the Women's American Basketball Association (WABA). Averaging 27 points per game and voted the league's Most Valuable Player, she helped Dallas win the 1984 WABA championship, but the league folded after the season. The final game played was between the Diamonds and the WABA All-Stars, where Lieberman scored 19 points and was named the game's MVP in the Diamonds' 101-94 victory.
In 1986, Lieberman signed with the Springfield Fame of the men's professional United States Basketball League (USBL) where she went on to average 1.7 points in 11 minutes per game. She remained in the league the following season, playing for the Long Island Knights. Later, she toured with the Washington Generals, who served as the regular opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters, where she met her future husband, teammate Tim Cline.
She was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1996 and to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.
In the newly formed WNBA's inaugural year in 1997, Lieberman played for the Phoenix Mercury. At the age of 39, she was the WNBA's oldest player. On July 24, 2008, at 50 years old, Lieberman signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock, breaking her own previous record as the oldest player in league history. She played one game and had two assists and two turnovers against the Houston Comets. The Comets defeated the Shock 79–61.
National team career
At age 17, Lieberman was named to the USA Basketball team roster. She played for the team in the 1975 USA Women's Pan American Team, three years younger than the next youngest teammates. The games were held in Mexico City, Mexico in October. The Pan Am team had failed to win the gold in 1967 and 1971. In 1975, the team was more successful, compiling a 7–0 record, and winning the gold medal for the first time since 1963.
Lieberman continued with the USA team to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in the first women's Olympic basketball team competition. Shortly after turning 18, Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, when the United States captured the silver medal.
Lieberman was named to the team representing the US at the 1979 William Jones Cup competition in Taipei. The USA team won all six games on the way to the gold medal. Lieberman earned a spot on the Jones Cup All-Tournament Team
Lieberman played with the team at the 1979 Pan American games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the team easily won most of their games, they lost to Cuba, 91–86, and received the silver medal.
In 1980, Lieberman earned a slot on the 1980 Olympic team, but withdrew from the squad in support of U.S. President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. She failed to make the final roster for the 1990 Goodwill Games and the 1992 Olympics.
Coaching career
WNBA
In 1998, Lieberman was hired as general manager and head coach of the WNBA's Detroit Shock. She coached for three seasons. After leaving the Shock, Lieberman worked as a women's basketball analyst on ESPN.
NBA G League
In November 2009, Lieberman became the coach of the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League (now NBA G League), an affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks, thus becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The team began play in November 2010. She later moved to a front office position with the Legends before joining Fox Sports Oklahoma as an analyst for the Oklahoma City Thunder studio show, Thunder Live.
NBA
In July 2015, she was hired by the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach, becoming the second female assistant coach in NBA history. She took two leaves of absence to care for her ailing mother before leaving the Kings in 2017. After the Kings, she became a broadcaster with the New Orleans Pelicans.
BIG3
On March 21, 2018, it was announced that Lieberman was hired as a head coach of Power in the BIG3 league, replacing Clyde Drexler. In her first season as head coach, she led her team to the 2018 Championship, defeating 3's Company to become the first ever female coach in the BIG3 to win a championship.
Career statistics
College
Source
WNBA
Regular season
Source
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 25 || 0 || 11.2 || .325 || .231 || .800 || 1.3 || 1.6 || 0.6 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 2008
| style="text-align:left;"| Detroit
| 1 || 0 || 9.0 || .000 || – || – || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0
|-
| align="left" | Career
| 2 years, 2 teams
| 26 || 0 || 11.1 || .321 || .231 || .800 || 1.2 || 1.6 || 0.5 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.5
|}
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 1 || 0 || 1.0 || – || – || – || 0.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 1.0 || 0.0 || 0.0
|}
Awards and honors
1979-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1979-The Honda-Broderick Cup winner for all sports.
1980-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1999-Inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Personal life
in 1988, Lieberman married one of her teammates with the Generals, Tim Cline, taking the surname Lieberman-Cline until the couple's divorce on March 15, 2001.
Their son Timothy Joseph or T. J., played college basketball for the Richmond Spiders, and in November 2017 signed to play for Israeli team Hapoel Holon, which plays in the Ligat HaAl, the top division of Israeli basketball.
In religious matters, despite her Jewish upbringing, Lieberman became a Christian late in her life and was described as having embraced born-again Christianity and a 2015 Jerusalem Post article. Nonetheless, she said in an interview in 2010, "I am 100% Jewish. My father's parents were deeply religious, we had two sets of silverware when we went and ate over there. My mother's side observed the major holidays. It was more relaxed. I went to Hebrew school as well." In 2011, she visited Israel with her mother, saying "It has changed my outlook of Israel. I know as a Jewish woman how important it is for me to be connected to this culture and to this community."
Lieberman was a contestant on the season 4 Gold Medal Challenge of Champions special of American Gladiators. She was eliminated after the third event with the lowest score of the three female competitors.
On August 13, 2008, she was part of the inaugural class to be inducted into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, honoring athletes, coaches and administrators who made contributions to sports in Southeastern Virginia.
See also
List of female NBA coaches
Nancy Lieberman Award
List of select Jewish basketball players
WBCBL Professional Basketball Trailblazer Award
Notes
References
External links
Official website
Biography on Jewish Women Encyclopedia
Lieberman articles on ESPN.com
Profile on Women's basketball Hall of Fame
Profile on Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
1958 births
Living people
All-American college women's basketball players
American evangelicals
American Gladiators contestants
American men's basketball coaches
American women's basketball coaches
American women's basketball players
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players at the 1975 Pan American Games
Basketball players at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Basketball players at the 1979 Pan American Games
Basketball players from New York City
Big3 coaches
Christians from New York (state)
Converts to evangelical Christianity
Detroit Shock head coaches
Detroit Shock players
Far Rockaway High School alumni
Jewish American sportspeople
Jewish women's basketball players
Medalists at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association broadcasters
Old Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in basketball
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in basketball
Pan American Games silver medalists for the United States
People from Far Rockaway, Queens
Phoenix Mercury draft picks
Phoenix Mercury players
Point guards
Sacramento Kings assistant coaches
Sportspeople from Brooklyn
Sportspeople from Queens, New York
Texas Legends coaches
Washington Generals players
Women's National Basketball Association executives
Women sports announcers
Women's Sports Foundation executives
United States Basketball League players
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
United States women's national basketball team players
| false |
[
"Melanochromis baliodigma is a species of cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi where it is only known from the area around Membe Point in areas where sandy bottoms meet up with rocky areas. This species can grow to a length of SL.\n\nReferences\n\nFauna of Malawi\nbaliodigma\nTaxa named by Nancy Jean Bowers\nTaxa named by Jay Richard Stauffer Jr.\nFish described in 1997\nTaxonomy articles created by Polbot",
"The second season of Weeds premiered on August 14, 2006, and consisted of 12 episodes.\n\nPlot \nThe second season, while comedic, has a darker tone, as Nancy becomes increasingly involved in the more dangerous aspects of the drug world. In season two, Silas is sixteen years old and Shane is eleven. Ignoring Heylia's advice, Nancy and Conrad start their own small-scale growing operation and eventually rent a suburban \"grow-house\", where they can grow marijuana indoors using artificial light and hydroponics. Peter tells Nancy that he knows she is a drug dealer, but considers her too small-time to be worth busting, and the two are married as part of a deal to legally protect Nancy from Peter testifying in a court of law. While Nancy's drug activities increase, Celia wins Doug's spot on the town council, due to the incompetence of Dean, who forgets to file Doug's paperwork, thus leaving Doug off the ballot. Celia immediately launches a drug-free campaign across Agrestic, with drug-free zone signs and surveillance cameras. Doug and Celia share a strong desire for revenge on Dean, which inspires a brief sexual liaison.\n\nSilas and Megan's relationship threatens to finish once she leaves for college (she, a very serious student, is going to Princeton). Silas attempts to get her pregnant to prevent this, but instead his success leads to her parents forcing her to have an abortion and to a violent confrontation with Megan's father, ending the relationship. Andy tries to develop a relationship with an attractive, sexually formidable administrator, Yael Hoffman, at his rabbinical school, but this falls apart once he tells her he is planning to drop out, due to an incident at the grow house where a dog bites off two of his toes; he thinks this will invalidate his military obligation.\n\nNancy's children become more aware of her illegal activities, although her sons deal with this in different ways. Shane continues to have problems fitting in at school and his friends begin to ridicule him for his sexual inexperience. To resolve the problem, Andy takes him to a massage parlor to get a \"happy ending\" hand job. Gaining confidence, Shane joins the debate team to get closer to a classmate, Gretchen, who later becomes his girlfriend. However, he breaks up with her because of an infatuation with Andy's estranged ex-girlfriend, Kat. Silas takes out his frustrations through vandalism, most notably by stealing Celia's drug-free zone signs and cameras to help his mother. Meanwhile, Nancy has received threats from Armenian dealers who have local grow houses and see her as encroaching on their territory. Nancy tells Peter, and he has them all arrested.\n\nNancy and Conrad's drug business does well as Conrad's strain of plant (which Snoop Dogg dubs \"MILFweed\" during a chance meeting at a recording studio) is popular with customers, but their high-profile causes trouble. Nancy and Conrad get intimate. Initially, Nancy's marriage to a DEA agent keeps her on top while her Armenian rivals were busted, but her marriage to Peter deteriorates after she tips off Heylia when the DEA plans to raid her house. Peter pressures Nancy to quit dealing. When Peter comes over for dinner and manhandles Silas, a shocked Nancy calls Conrad and tells him that she doesn't love Peter, but will string him along until the current harvest is done; Peter hears the conversation with wireless surveillance. Meanwhile, Doug and Celia plan to leave their spouses. Celia tells Dean, but Doug refuses to leave his wife, Dana, ending their affair. Dean kicks Celia out of the house and demands a divorce.\n\nThe season concludes with a complex series of betrayals, as Peter demands from Nancy and Conrad all of the cash from a quick sale of their crop. Heylia hires Armenian mobsters to kill Peter, as she believes Peter is planning to kill Conrad after the deal. Nancy's buyer, U-Turn, demands the entire crop at gunpoint. The Armenian mobsters arrive at the same time, kill Peter, and expect the proceeds from the big sale to pay for their hit. When they realize that U-Turn plans to steal the weed, they decide to take the weed instead. Only then does Nancy discover that Silas has stolen the entire batch and will hold it until his mother allows him to join her business. Minutes after hiding the batch in his car trunk, he is approached by Celia and a police officer for the theft of the drug-free zone signs and surveillance cameras, because Celia has footage of Silas stealing the last camera. This leaves Nancy at the grow house, in a Mexican standoff with both the gangsters and the mobsters pointing guns at her in a season-ending cliffhanger.\n\nCast\n\nMain cast \nMary-Louise Parker as Nancy Botwin (12 episodes)\nElizabeth Perkins as Celia Hodes (12 episodes)\nTonye Patano as Heylia James (11 episodes)\nRomany Malco as Conrad Shepherd (12 episodes)\nJustin Kirk as Andy Botwin (12 episodes)\nHunter Parrish as Silas Botwin (12 episodes)\nAlexander Gould as Shane Botwin (12 episodes)\nKevin Nealon as Doug Wilson (12 episodes)\n\nSpecial guest stars \nZooey Deschanel as Kat Wheeler\nMartin Donovan as Peter Scottson\n\nRecurring cast \n\nIndigo as Vaneeta James\nRenée Victor as Lupita\nAndy Milder as Dean Hodes\nMaulik Pancholy as Sanjay Patel\nMeital Dohan as Yael Hoffman\nFatso-Fasano as Marvin\nAllie Grant as Isabelle Hodes\nShoshannah Stern as Megan Graves\nEden Sher as Gretchen\nDaryl Sabara as Tim Scottson\nVincent Laresca as Alejandro\nBecky Thyre as Pam Gruber\nDavid Doty as Principal Dodge\nPage Kennedy as U-Turn\nJack Stehlin as Captain Roy Till\nRemy Auberjonois as Mr. Albin\nSammy Fine as Benj\nBob Rumnock as Mr. Lippman\nEric Cadora as Agent Shuman\nRon Canada as Joseph\nShawn Michael Patrick as Agent Fundis\nArthur Darbinyan as Aram Keshisyan\nRobert Allen Mukes as Abumchuk\nKasey Campbell as Shut Up\nCody Klop as No Way\nCraig X. Rubin as Craig X\nDavid Bardeen as Director\n\nEpisodes\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n \n\n \n2006 American television seasons"
] |
[
"Nancy Lieberman",
"Early years",
"Where did Nancy grow up?",
"Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York"
] |
C_b4dc60e4f5dc46bf8f87d5ea86e9aefd_1
|
Was she an only child?
| 2 |
Was Nancy Lieberman an only child?
|
Nancy Lieberman
|
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1, 1958, to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She was raised Jewish, but has become a born-again Christian. Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore. While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of only 12 slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where she brought home a gold medal Lieberman's mother, Renee, was not supportive of her daughter's passion for basketball. During one instance when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors, because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Nancy then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs. During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an AAU team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles. CANNOTANSWER
|
she grew up with her older brother Clifford.
|
Nancy Elizabeth Lieberman (born July 1, 1958), nicknamed "Lady Magic", is an American former professional basketball player and coach in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) who is currently a broadcaster for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the head coach of Power, a team in the BIG3 which she led to its 2018 Championship. Lieberman is regarded as one of the greatest figures in American women's basketball.
In 2000, she was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame. Lieberman is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Early life
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She is Jewish (and described herself as "just a poor, skinny, redheaded Jewish girl from Queens"). Her family lived in Brooklyn when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. She lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust, and her paternal grandparents, who survived, had concentration camp numbers on their wrists.
Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
Lieberman's mother Renee was not supportive of her daughter's interest in basketball. Once, when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Lieberman then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs.
Playing career
High school career
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of the 12 coveted slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, while still in her teens, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where the team won a gold medal.
During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an Amateur Athletic Union team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles.
She told former Knick Walt Frazier that he was her hero and that it was because of him that she wore No. 10, saying: "You might not even know this, but you thought you were affecting young guys but you were affecting young, white Jewish women, not just boys."
College career
From 1976 to 1980, Lieberman attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and played on the women's basketball team there. During that time, she and her team won two consecutive AIAW National Championships (1979, 1980) and one WNIT (Women's National Invitation Tournament) Championship in 1978. She was the first two-time winner of the prestigious Wade Trophy, a national player of the year award in college women's basketball, and was selected as the Broderick Award winner for basketball as the top women's player in America. Lieberman also won three consecutive Kodak All-America awards (1978, '79, '80). Lieberman was one of six young adults to win the Young American Award from the Boy Scouts of America in 1980.
Lieberman earned the nickname "Lady Magic," a nod to Earvin "Magic" Johnson of NBA fame. Lieberman set a school record for career assists (961) that still stands today. She led the team in assists each of the four years she was on the team—in her sophomore year she averaged 8.9 per game. Lieberman amassed 2,430 points along with 1,167 rebounds in her collegiate career, producing an average of 18.1 points per game. Lieberman achieved a triple double (40 points, 15 rebounds, 11 assists) against Norfolk State in her sophomore year. Lieberman stole the ball 562 times and assisted a basket 961 times in her college career, believed to be modern records. She is the holder of several single-game and single-season records, including best free-throw shooting percentage in her freshman and sophomore years.
Lieberman earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University on May 6, 1980. She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
Professional career
In 1980 she was selected with the first pick in the Women's Pro Basketball League (WPBL) draft by the Dallas Diamonds. She helped Dallas to the 1981 WPBL finals, where they lost to the Nebraska Wranglers in five games. She was named the "rookie of the year", after averaging 26.3 points per game. Lieberman's WBL career is featured in the book Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978–1981.
In 1981, she played for the Los Angeles Lakers Summer Pro League team.
In 1984, she once again suited up for the Dallas Diamonds, signing a three-year, $250,000 contract with the team to play in the Women's American Basketball Association (WABA). Averaging 27 points per game and voted the league's Most Valuable Player, she helped Dallas win the 1984 WABA championship, but the league folded after the season. The final game played was between the Diamonds and the WABA All-Stars, where Lieberman scored 19 points and was named the game's MVP in the Diamonds' 101-94 victory.
In 1986, Lieberman signed with the Springfield Fame of the men's professional United States Basketball League (USBL) where she went on to average 1.7 points in 11 minutes per game. She remained in the league the following season, playing for the Long Island Knights. Later, she toured with the Washington Generals, who served as the regular opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters, where she met her future husband, teammate Tim Cline.
She was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1996 and to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.
In the newly formed WNBA's inaugural year in 1997, Lieberman played for the Phoenix Mercury. At the age of 39, she was the WNBA's oldest player. On July 24, 2008, at 50 years old, Lieberman signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock, breaking her own previous record as the oldest player in league history. She played one game and had two assists and two turnovers against the Houston Comets. The Comets defeated the Shock 79–61.
National team career
At age 17, Lieberman was named to the USA Basketball team roster. She played for the team in the 1975 USA Women's Pan American Team, three years younger than the next youngest teammates. The games were held in Mexico City, Mexico in October. The Pan Am team had failed to win the gold in 1967 and 1971. In 1975, the team was more successful, compiling a 7–0 record, and winning the gold medal for the first time since 1963.
Lieberman continued with the USA team to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in the first women's Olympic basketball team competition. Shortly after turning 18, Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, when the United States captured the silver medal.
Lieberman was named to the team representing the US at the 1979 William Jones Cup competition in Taipei. The USA team won all six games on the way to the gold medal. Lieberman earned a spot on the Jones Cup All-Tournament Team
Lieberman played with the team at the 1979 Pan American games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the team easily won most of their games, they lost to Cuba, 91–86, and received the silver medal.
In 1980, Lieberman earned a slot on the 1980 Olympic team, but withdrew from the squad in support of U.S. President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. She failed to make the final roster for the 1990 Goodwill Games and the 1992 Olympics.
Coaching career
WNBA
In 1998, Lieberman was hired as general manager and head coach of the WNBA's Detroit Shock. She coached for three seasons. After leaving the Shock, Lieberman worked as a women's basketball analyst on ESPN.
NBA G League
In November 2009, Lieberman became the coach of the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League (now NBA G League), an affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks, thus becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The team began play in November 2010. She later moved to a front office position with the Legends before joining Fox Sports Oklahoma as an analyst for the Oklahoma City Thunder studio show, Thunder Live.
NBA
In July 2015, she was hired by the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach, becoming the second female assistant coach in NBA history. She took two leaves of absence to care for her ailing mother before leaving the Kings in 2017. After the Kings, she became a broadcaster with the New Orleans Pelicans.
BIG3
On March 21, 2018, it was announced that Lieberman was hired as a head coach of Power in the BIG3 league, replacing Clyde Drexler. In her first season as head coach, she led her team to the 2018 Championship, defeating 3's Company to become the first ever female coach in the BIG3 to win a championship.
Career statistics
College
Source
WNBA
Regular season
Source
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 25 || 0 || 11.2 || .325 || .231 || .800 || 1.3 || 1.6 || 0.6 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 2008
| style="text-align:left;"| Detroit
| 1 || 0 || 9.0 || .000 || – || – || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0
|-
| align="left" | Career
| 2 years, 2 teams
| 26 || 0 || 11.1 || .321 || .231 || .800 || 1.2 || 1.6 || 0.5 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.5
|}
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 1 || 0 || 1.0 || – || – || – || 0.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 1.0 || 0.0 || 0.0
|}
Awards and honors
1979-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1979-The Honda-Broderick Cup winner for all sports.
1980-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1999-Inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Personal life
in 1988, Lieberman married one of her teammates with the Generals, Tim Cline, taking the surname Lieberman-Cline until the couple's divorce on March 15, 2001.
Their son Timothy Joseph or T. J., played college basketball for the Richmond Spiders, and in November 2017 signed to play for Israeli team Hapoel Holon, which plays in the Ligat HaAl, the top division of Israeli basketball.
In religious matters, despite her Jewish upbringing, Lieberman became a Christian late in her life and was described as having embraced born-again Christianity and a 2015 Jerusalem Post article. Nonetheless, she said in an interview in 2010, "I am 100% Jewish. My father's parents were deeply religious, we had two sets of silverware when we went and ate over there. My mother's side observed the major holidays. It was more relaxed. I went to Hebrew school as well." In 2011, she visited Israel with her mother, saying "It has changed my outlook of Israel. I know as a Jewish woman how important it is for me to be connected to this culture and to this community."
Lieberman was a contestant on the season 4 Gold Medal Challenge of Champions special of American Gladiators. She was eliminated after the third event with the lowest score of the three female competitors.
On August 13, 2008, she was part of the inaugural class to be inducted into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, honoring athletes, coaches and administrators who made contributions to sports in Southeastern Virginia.
See also
List of female NBA coaches
Nancy Lieberman Award
List of select Jewish basketball players
WBCBL Professional Basketball Trailblazer Award
Notes
References
External links
Official website
Biography on Jewish Women Encyclopedia
Lieberman articles on ESPN.com
Profile on Women's basketball Hall of Fame
Profile on Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
1958 births
Living people
All-American college women's basketball players
American evangelicals
American Gladiators contestants
American men's basketball coaches
American women's basketball coaches
American women's basketball players
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players at the 1975 Pan American Games
Basketball players at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Basketball players at the 1979 Pan American Games
Basketball players from New York City
Big3 coaches
Christians from New York (state)
Converts to evangelical Christianity
Detroit Shock head coaches
Detroit Shock players
Far Rockaway High School alumni
Jewish American sportspeople
Jewish women's basketball players
Medalists at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association broadcasters
Old Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in basketball
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in basketball
Pan American Games silver medalists for the United States
People from Far Rockaway, Queens
Phoenix Mercury draft picks
Phoenix Mercury players
Point guards
Sacramento Kings assistant coaches
Sportspeople from Brooklyn
Sportspeople from Queens, New York
Texas Legends coaches
Washington Generals players
Women's National Basketball Association executives
Women sports announcers
Women's Sports Foundation executives
United States Basketball League players
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
United States women's national basketball team players
| true |
[
"The Hon. Charlotte Helen Long (9 October 1965 – 6 October 1984) was an English aristocrat and child actress, the youngest daughter of the 4th Viscount Long.\n\nBorn in Devizes, Wiltshire, she attended the Stonar School, Atworth, and then Fitzmaurice Grammar School until its closure in 1980 and then St Laurence Comprehensive School, both in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire.\n\nLong played Alison in the television adaptations of Peter Glidewell's Schoolgirl Chums and St. Ursula's in Danger in 1982 and 1983 respectively. Later she appeared in the 1984 film The Chain.\n\nShe played Eloise de Ricordeau in the first series of the BBC Drama The Tripods but was killed before filming the second series. She died three days after sustaining injuries in an accident on the M4 motorway, when a lorry crashed into her parked car after it had broken down. Her passenger survived with only minor injuries. The resulting inquest heard that the lorry driver had sneezed, causing his vehicle to crash into her car while it was parked on the hard shoulder. She was replaced by Cindy Shelley for the second series of The Tripods.\n\nSee also\nJuanita Coco, an Australian child singer who was killed in an accident whilst still a teenager\nJessica Jacobs, an Australian child actress and singer who was killed in an accident whilst still a teenager\nJaclyn Linetsky, an American child actress who was killed in an accident whilst still a teenager\nRob Knox, an English male child actor who was murdered in a pub brawl whilst still a teenager\nHeather O'Rourke, an American child actress who died whist still a child\nJudith Barsi, an American child actress who was murdered whist still a child\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1965 births\n1984 deaths\nEnglish television actresses\nRoad incident deaths in England\nDaughters of viscounts\nCharlotte\nPeople from Devizes\nPeople educated at Fitzmaurice Grammar School\n20th-century English actresses\n20th-century English businesswomen",
"Paulina F. Kernberg (January 10, 1935 – April 12, 2006) was a Chilean American child psychiatrist, an authority on personality disorders, and a professor at Cornell University.\n\nBiography \n\nKernberg was born in Chile and became a U.S. citizen in 1968. She was married to Otto F. Kernberg, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell. \n\nPaulina Kernberg's work included studies on the emotional effects of divorce, where she noted the trauma from divorce was second only to a parent's death in the perception of children involved. Following this work, she helped found a clinical program for children of divorced families at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She was the director of the Residency Program in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Payne Whitney Westchester-Weill Cornell Medical Center since 1978, until her death. She was a teacher at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where she was a supervising and training analyst in Psychoanalysis and Child Psychoanalysis. She authored over 100 articles and chapters in child psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and presented internationally and in multiple languages. \n\nKernberg was noted for her work evaluating Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy at the center of an international custody battle in 2000 in what quickly became an inflammatory issue among Cuban-Americans and in the United States Congress. She described and proved that children show specific patterns of behavior in the playroom and repeat certain play themes according to their diagnosis. She also developed a questionnaire that the child psychiatrist uses during an assessment interview to measure the level of personality integration in adolescents, depending on their capacity to relate to peers and friends. She developed a standardized interview that is done to the mother and child when they are in front of a mirror, and also developed a similar instrument to assess the personality integration of adolescents. Kernberg was the first who described and studied with statistical analysis the early signs of personality disorders, which she said were already present and treatable in children and adolescents. \n\nShe died of cancer in New York City at age 71.\n\nSee also \n\n Dynamite, a children's magazine to which Kernberg contributed an advice column\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n Video of Dr. Peter Wilson's interview of Paulina Kernberg for the History of the Department of Psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital\n\n1935 births\n2006 deaths\nAmerican psychoanalysts\nChilean emigrants to the United States\nCornell University faculty\nNaturalized citizens of the United States"
] |
[
"Nancy Lieberman",
"Early years",
"Where did Nancy grow up?",
"Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York",
"Was she an only child?",
"she grew up with her older brother Clifford."
] |
C_b4dc60e4f5dc46bf8f87d5ea86e9aefd_1
|
When did she start playing basketball
| 3 |
When did Nancy Lieberman start playing basketball?
|
Nancy Lieberman
|
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1, 1958, to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She was raised Jewish, but has become a born-again Christian. Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore. While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of only 12 slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where she brought home a gold medal Lieberman's mother, Renee, was not supportive of her daughter's passion for basketball. During one instance when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors, because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Nancy then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs. During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an AAU team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles. CANNOTANSWER
|
While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport.
|
Nancy Elizabeth Lieberman (born July 1, 1958), nicknamed "Lady Magic", is an American former professional basketball player and coach in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) who is currently a broadcaster for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the head coach of Power, a team in the BIG3 which she led to its 2018 Championship. Lieberman is regarded as one of the greatest figures in American women's basketball.
In 2000, she was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame. Lieberman is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Early life
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She is Jewish (and described herself as "just a poor, skinny, redheaded Jewish girl from Queens"). Her family lived in Brooklyn when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. She lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust, and her paternal grandparents, who survived, had concentration camp numbers on their wrists.
Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
Lieberman's mother Renee was not supportive of her daughter's interest in basketball. Once, when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Lieberman then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs.
Playing career
High school career
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of the 12 coveted slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, while still in her teens, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where the team won a gold medal.
During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an Amateur Athletic Union team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles.
She told former Knick Walt Frazier that he was her hero and that it was because of him that she wore No. 10, saying: "You might not even know this, but you thought you were affecting young guys but you were affecting young, white Jewish women, not just boys."
College career
From 1976 to 1980, Lieberman attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and played on the women's basketball team there. During that time, she and her team won two consecutive AIAW National Championships (1979, 1980) and one WNIT (Women's National Invitation Tournament) Championship in 1978. She was the first two-time winner of the prestigious Wade Trophy, a national player of the year award in college women's basketball, and was selected as the Broderick Award winner for basketball as the top women's player in America. Lieberman also won three consecutive Kodak All-America awards (1978, '79, '80). Lieberman was one of six young adults to win the Young American Award from the Boy Scouts of America in 1980.
Lieberman earned the nickname "Lady Magic," a nod to Earvin "Magic" Johnson of NBA fame. Lieberman set a school record for career assists (961) that still stands today. She led the team in assists each of the four years she was on the team—in her sophomore year she averaged 8.9 per game. Lieberman amassed 2,430 points along with 1,167 rebounds in her collegiate career, producing an average of 18.1 points per game. Lieberman achieved a triple double (40 points, 15 rebounds, 11 assists) against Norfolk State in her sophomore year. Lieberman stole the ball 562 times and assisted a basket 961 times in her college career, believed to be modern records. She is the holder of several single-game and single-season records, including best free-throw shooting percentage in her freshman and sophomore years.
Lieberman earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University on May 6, 1980. She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
Professional career
In 1980 she was selected with the first pick in the Women's Pro Basketball League (WPBL) draft by the Dallas Diamonds. She helped Dallas to the 1981 WPBL finals, where they lost to the Nebraska Wranglers in five games. She was named the "rookie of the year", after averaging 26.3 points per game. Lieberman's WBL career is featured in the book Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978–1981.
In 1981, she played for the Los Angeles Lakers Summer Pro League team.
In 1984, she once again suited up for the Dallas Diamonds, signing a three-year, $250,000 contract with the team to play in the Women's American Basketball Association (WABA). Averaging 27 points per game and voted the league's Most Valuable Player, she helped Dallas win the 1984 WABA championship, but the league folded after the season. The final game played was between the Diamonds and the WABA All-Stars, where Lieberman scored 19 points and was named the game's MVP in the Diamonds' 101-94 victory.
In 1986, Lieberman signed with the Springfield Fame of the men's professional United States Basketball League (USBL) where she went on to average 1.7 points in 11 minutes per game. She remained in the league the following season, playing for the Long Island Knights. Later, she toured with the Washington Generals, who served as the regular opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters, where she met her future husband, teammate Tim Cline.
She was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1996 and to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.
In the newly formed WNBA's inaugural year in 1997, Lieberman played for the Phoenix Mercury. At the age of 39, she was the WNBA's oldest player. On July 24, 2008, at 50 years old, Lieberman signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock, breaking her own previous record as the oldest player in league history. She played one game and had two assists and two turnovers against the Houston Comets. The Comets defeated the Shock 79–61.
National team career
At age 17, Lieberman was named to the USA Basketball team roster. She played for the team in the 1975 USA Women's Pan American Team, three years younger than the next youngest teammates. The games were held in Mexico City, Mexico in October. The Pan Am team had failed to win the gold in 1967 and 1971. In 1975, the team was more successful, compiling a 7–0 record, and winning the gold medal for the first time since 1963.
Lieberman continued with the USA team to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in the first women's Olympic basketball team competition. Shortly after turning 18, Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, when the United States captured the silver medal.
Lieberman was named to the team representing the US at the 1979 William Jones Cup competition in Taipei. The USA team won all six games on the way to the gold medal. Lieberman earned a spot on the Jones Cup All-Tournament Team
Lieberman played with the team at the 1979 Pan American games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the team easily won most of their games, they lost to Cuba, 91–86, and received the silver medal.
In 1980, Lieberman earned a slot on the 1980 Olympic team, but withdrew from the squad in support of U.S. President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. She failed to make the final roster for the 1990 Goodwill Games and the 1992 Olympics.
Coaching career
WNBA
In 1998, Lieberman was hired as general manager and head coach of the WNBA's Detroit Shock. She coached for three seasons. After leaving the Shock, Lieberman worked as a women's basketball analyst on ESPN.
NBA G League
In November 2009, Lieberman became the coach of the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League (now NBA G League), an affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks, thus becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The team began play in November 2010. She later moved to a front office position with the Legends before joining Fox Sports Oklahoma as an analyst for the Oklahoma City Thunder studio show, Thunder Live.
NBA
In July 2015, she was hired by the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach, becoming the second female assistant coach in NBA history. She took two leaves of absence to care for her ailing mother before leaving the Kings in 2017. After the Kings, she became a broadcaster with the New Orleans Pelicans.
BIG3
On March 21, 2018, it was announced that Lieberman was hired as a head coach of Power in the BIG3 league, replacing Clyde Drexler. In her first season as head coach, she led her team to the 2018 Championship, defeating 3's Company to become the first ever female coach in the BIG3 to win a championship.
Career statistics
College
Source
WNBA
Regular season
Source
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 25 || 0 || 11.2 || .325 || .231 || .800 || 1.3 || 1.6 || 0.6 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 2008
| style="text-align:left;"| Detroit
| 1 || 0 || 9.0 || .000 || – || – || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0
|-
| align="left" | Career
| 2 years, 2 teams
| 26 || 0 || 11.1 || .321 || .231 || .800 || 1.2 || 1.6 || 0.5 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.5
|}
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 1 || 0 || 1.0 || – || – || – || 0.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 1.0 || 0.0 || 0.0
|}
Awards and honors
1979-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1979-The Honda-Broderick Cup winner for all sports.
1980-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1999-Inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Personal life
in 1988, Lieberman married one of her teammates with the Generals, Tim Cline, taking the surname Lieberman-Cline until the couple's divorce on March 15, 2001.
Their son Timothy Joseph or T. J., played college basketball for the Richmond Spiders, and in November 2017 signed to play for Israeli team Hapoel Holon, which plays in the Ligat HaAl, the top division of Israeli basketball.
In religious matters, despite her Jewish upbringing, Lieberman became a Christian late in her life and was described as having embraced born-again Christianity and a 2015 Jerusalem Post article. Nonetheless, she said in an interview in 2010, "I am 100% Jewish. My father's parents were deeply religious, we had two sets of silverware when we went and ate over there. My mother's side observed the major holidays. It was more relaxed. I went to Hebrew school as well." In 2011, she visited Israel with her mother, saying "It has changed my outlook of Israel. I know as a Jewish woman how important it is for me to be connected to this culture and to this community."
Lieberman was a contestant on the season 4 Gold Medal Challenge of Champions special of American Gladiators. She was eliminated after the third event with the lowest score of the three female competitors.
On August 13, 2008, she was part of the inaugural class to be inducted into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, honoring athletes, coaches and administrators who made contributions to sports in Southeastern Virginia.
See also
List of female NBA coaches
Nancy Lieberman Award
List of select Jewish basketball players
WBCBL Professional Basketball Trailblazer Award
Notes
References
External links
Official website
Biography on Jewish Women Encyclopedia
Lieberman articles on ESPN.com
Profile on Women's basketball Hall of Fame
Profile on Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
1958 births
Living people
All-American college women's basketball players
American evangelicals
American Gladiators contestants
American men's basketball coaches
American women's basketball coaches
American women's basketball players
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players at the 1975 Pan American Games
Basketball players at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Basketball players at the 1979 Pan American Games
Basketball players from New York City
Big3 coaches
Christians from New York (state)
Converts to evangelical Christianity
Detroit Shock head coaches
Detroit Shock players
Far Rockaway High School alumni
Jewish American sportspeople
Jewish women's basketball players
Medalists at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association broadcasters
Old Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in basketball
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in basketball
Pan American Games silver medalists for the United States
People from Far Rockaway, Queens
Phoenix Mercury draft picks
Phoenix Mercury players
Point guards
Sacramento Kings assistant coaches
Sportspeople from Brooklyn
Sportspeople from Queens, New York
Texas Legends coaches
Washington Generals players
Women's National Basketball Association executives
Women sports announcers
Women's Sports Foundation executives
United States Basketball League players
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
United States women's national basketball team players
| false |
[
"Teisha Shadwell (born 2003) is an Australian 4.5 point wheelchair basketball player. In May 2019, she was part of the Australian Devils U25 team that won silver at the 2019 Women's U25 Wheelchair Basketball World Championship in Suphanburi, Thailand.\n\nBiography\nTeisha Shadwell began playing basketball when she was five years old, and played at the state level when she was nine. She won a Grand Final playing with the Knox Raiders Under 12 team, and was named MVP for that game. She went on to be selected for the Victorian Under 14 and Under 15 state sides.\n\nIn 2016, Shadwell played with the Knox 14.1 team that won both the Melbourne United Victorian Junior Basketball League (VJBL) Victorian Championship and then, in September 2016, the Australian Under 14 Club Championships in Newcastle. She had been feeling considerable pain, and after the match, CT scans revealed that she had been playing the whole week with breaks in bones in her hand and both her feet. Her hand healed well, but the navicular bone fractures did not. Doctors gave her a ten per cent chance of ever being able to play basketball again. Any further attempt risked serious and permanent injury.\n\nIn January 2017, Shadwell turned to playing wheelchair basketball. She made rapid progress. Six weeks later, she was playing with the Kilsyth Cobras in the Women's National Wheelchair Basketball League (WNWBL), and training with the Australian national team (the Gliders), and the Under 25 national team (the Devils) in preparation for the 2019 Under 25 World Championships. That year she received the WNWBL’s 2017 best new talent award, and Basketball Victoria's Charles Ryan award for Wheelchair Athlete Of The Year. A series of fundraisers, including a campaign on GoFundMe, raised money for a custom-built wheelchair.\n\nShadwell played in the Victorian side in the 2019 Kevin Coombs Cup, and in May 2019, she made her international debut with the Devils at the 2019 Women's U25 Wheelchair Basketball World Championship in Suphanburi, Thailand, where they won silver.\n\nReferences\n\nAustralian women's wheelchair basketball players\nLiving people\nSportswomen from Victoria (Australia)\n2003 births",
"Hamchétou Maïga-Ba (born 25 April 1978 in Bamako) is a Malian professional women's basketball player most recently with the Minnesota Lynx of the WNBA. She is also a member of the Mali women's national basketball team.\n\nAt Old Dominion\nMaïga was an All-American player her senior year at Old Dominion University, as well as a three time All-Colonial Athletic Association team member. Senior year, she led the team in scoring (13.7 ppg).\n\nOld Dominion University statistics\n\nSource\n\nWNBA and overseas career\nDrafted with the 10th overall pick in the 2002 WNBA Draft, Maïga did not start a full season for a WNBA squad until the 2007 season. Starting all 34 games for Houston, Maïga averaged 9.1 points per game, along with 4 rebounds, 2.3 assists and 1.7 steals per game. she was # 25\n\nDuring the 2008–09 WNBA offseason, she was playing in the Czech Republic with Brno. During the 2009–2010 offseason, she is playing in France with Tarbes GB.\n\nWith Mali\nMaïga was the captain of the Mali squad which won the FIBA Africa Championship for Women 2007. By winning the tournament, Mali qualified for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Maïga was the M.V.P. of the tournament.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Profile WNBA.com\n Interview concerning off-season in Europe WNBA.com\n Notice of MVP status fiba-africa.com\n\n1978 births\nLiving people\nBasketball players at the 2008 Summer Olympics\nExpatriate basketball people in the United States\nExpatriate sportspeople in the Czech Republic\nHouston Comets players\nMalian expatriates in the United States\nMalian women's basketball players\nMinnesota Lynx players\nOld Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players\nOlympic basketball players of Mali\nSportspeople from Bamako\nSacramento Monarchs players\nTarbes Gespe Bigorre players\nPower forwards (basketball)\n21st-century Malian people"
] |
[
"Nancy Lieberman",
"Early years",
"Where did Nancy grow up?",
"Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York",
"Was she an only child?",
"she grew up with her older brother Clifford.",
"When did she start playing basketball",
"While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport."
] |
C_b4dc60e4f5dc46bf8f87d5ea86e9aefd_1
|
Did she play in high school
| 4 |
Did Nancy Lieberman play basketball in high school?
|
Nancy Lieberman
|
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1, 1958, to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She was raised Jewish, but has become a born-again Christian. Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore. While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of only 12 slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where she brought home a gold medal Lieberman's mother, Renee, was not supportive of her daughter's passion for basketball. During one instance when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors, because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Nancy then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs. During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an AAU team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles. CANNOTANSWER
|
She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
|
Nancy Elizabeth Lieberman (born July 1, 1958), nicknamed "Lady Magic", is an American former professional basketball player and coach in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) who is currently a broadcaster for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the head coach of Power, a team in the BIG3 which she led to its 2018 Championship. Lieberman is regarded as one of the greatest figures in American women's basketball.
In 2000, she was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame. Lieberman is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Early life
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She is Jewish (and described herself as "just a poor, skinny, redheaded Jewish girl from Queens"). Her family lived in Brooklyn when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. She lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust, and her paternal grandparents, who survived, had concentration camp numbers on their wrists.
Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
Lieberman's mother Renee was not supportive of her daughter's interest in basketball. Once, when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Lieberman then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs.
Playing career
High school career
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of the 12 coveted slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, while still in her teens, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where the team won a gold medal.
During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an Amateur Athletic Union team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles.
She told former Knick Walt Frazier that he was her hero and that it was because of him that she wore No. 10, saying: "You might not even know this, but you thought you were affecting young guys but you were affecting young, white Jewish women, not just boys."
College career
From 1976 to 1980, Lieberman attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and played on the women's basketball team there. During that time, she and her team won two consecutive AIAW National Championships (1979, 1980) and one WNIT (Women's National Invitation Tournament) Championship in 1978. She was the first two-time winner of the prestigious Wade Trophy, a national player of the year award in college women's basketball, and was selected as the Broderick Award winner for basketball as the top women's player in America. Lieberman also won three consecutive Kodak All-America awards (1978, '79, '80). Lieberman was one of six young adults to win the Young American Award from the Boy Scouts of America in 1980.
Lieberman earned the nickname "Lady Magic," a nod to Earvin "Magic" Johnson of NBA fame. Lieberman set a school record for career assists (961) that still stands today. She led the team in assists each of the four years she was on the team—in her sophomore year she averaged 8.9 per game. Lieberman amassed 2,430 points along with 1,167 rebounds in her collegiate career, producing an average of 18.1 points per game. Lieberman achieved a triple double (40 points, 15 rebounds, 11 assists) against Norfolk State in her sophomore year. Lieberman stole the ball 562 times and assisted a basket 961 times in her college career, believed to be modern records. She is the holder of several single-game and single-season records, including best free-throw shooting percentage in her freshman and sophomore years.
Lieberman earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University on May 6, 1980. She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
Professional career
In 1980 she was selected with the first pick in the Women's Pro Basketball League (WPBL) draft by the Dallas Diamonds. She helped Dallas to the 1981 WPBL finals, where they lost to the Nebraska Wranglers in five games. She was named the "rookie of the year", after averaging 26.3 points per game. Lieberman's WBL career is featured in the book Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978–1981.
In 1981, she played for the Los Angeles Lakers Summer Pro League team.
In 1984, she once again suited up for the Dallas Diamonds, signing a three-year, $250,000 contract with the team to play in the Women's American Basketball Association (WABA). Averaging 27 points per game and voted the league's Most Valuable Player, she helped Dallas win the 1984 WABA championship, but the league folded after the season. The final game played was between the Diamonds and the WABA All-Stars, where Lieberman scored 19 points and was named the game's MVP in the Diamonds' 101-94 victory.
In 1986, Lieberman signed with the Springfield Fame of the men's professional United States Basketball League (USBL) where she went on to average 1.7 points in 11 minutes per game. She remained in the league the following season, playing for the Long Island Knights. Later, she toured with the Washington Generals, who served as the regular opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters, where she met her future husband, teammate Tim Cline.
She was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1996 and to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.
In the newly formed WNBA's inaugural year in 1997, Lieberman played for the Phoenix Mercury. At the age of 39, she was the WNBA's oldest player. On July 24, 2008, at 50 years old, Lieberman signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock, breaking her own previous record as the oldest player in league history. She played one game and had two assists and two turnovers against the Houston Comets. The Comets defeated the Shock 79–61.
National team career
At age 17, Lieberman was named to the USA Basketball team roster. She played for the team in the 1975 USA Women's Pan American Team, three years younger than the next youngest teammates. The games were held in Mexico City, Mexico in October. The Pan Am team had failed to win the gold in 1967 and 1971. In 1975, the team was more successful, compiling a 7–0 record, and winning the gold medal for the first time since 1963.
Lieberman continued with the USA team to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in the first women's Olympic basketball team competition. Shortly after turning 18, Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, when the United States captured the silver medal.
Lieberman was named to the team representing the US at the 1979 William Jones Cup competition in Taipei. The USA team won all six games on the way to the gold medal. Lieberman earned a spot on the Jones Cup All-Tournament Team
Lieberman played with the team at the 1979 Pan American games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the team easily won most of their games, they lost to Cuba, 91–86, and received the silver medal.
In 1980, Lieberman earned a slot on the 1980 Olympic team, but withdrew from the squad in support of U.S. President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. She failed to make the final roster for the 1990 Goodwill Games and the 1992 Olympics.
Coaching career
WNBA
In 1998, Lieberman was hired as general manager and head coach of the WNBA's Detroit Shock. She coached for three seasons. After leaving the Shock, Lieberman worked as a women's basketball analyst on ESPN.
NBA G League
In November 2009, Lieberman became the coach of the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League (now NBA G League), an affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks, thus becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The team began play in November 2010. She later moved to a front office position with the Legends before joining Fox Sports Oklahoma as an analyst for the Oklahoma City Thunder studio show, Thunder Live.
NBA
In July 2015, she was hired by the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach, becoming the second female assistant coach in NBA history. She took two leaves of absence to care for her ailing mother before leaving the Kings in 2017. After the Kings, she became a broadcaster with the New Orleans Pelicans.
BIG3
On March 21, 2018, it was announced that Lieberman was hired as a head coach of Power in the BIG3 league, replacing Clyde Drexler. In her first season as head coach, she led her team to the 2018 Championship, defeating 3's Company to become the first ever female coach in the BIG3 to win a championship.
Career statistics
College
Source
WNBA
Regular season
Source
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 25 || 0 || 11.2 || .325 || .231 || .800 || 1.3 || 1.6 || 0.6 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 2008
| style="text-align:left;"| Detroit
| 1 || 0 || 9.0 || .000 || – || – || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0
|-
| align="left" | Career
| 2 years, 2 teams
| 26 || 0 || 11.1 || .321 || .231 || .800 || 1.2 || 1.6 || 0.5 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.5
|}
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 1 || 0 || 1.0 || – || – || – || 0.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 1.0 || 0.0 || 0.0
|}
Awards and honors
1979-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1979-The Honda-Broderick Cup winner for all sports.
1980-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1999-Inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Personal life
in 1988, Lieberman married one of her teammates with the Generals, Tim Cline, taking the surname Lieberman-Cline until the couple's divorce on March 15, 2001.
Their son Timothy Joseph or T. J., played college basketball for the Richmond Spiders, and in November 2017 signed to play for Israeli team Hapoel Holon, which plays in the Ligat HaAl, the top division of Israeli basketball.
In religious matters, despite her Jewish upbringing, Lieberman became a Christian late in her life and was described as having embraced born-again Christianity and a 2015 Jerusalem Post article. Nonetheless, she said in an interview in 2010, "I am 100% Jewish. My father's parents were deeply religious, we had two sets of silverware when we went and ate over there. My mother's side observed the major holidays. It was more relaxed. I went to Hebrew school as well." In 2011, she visited Israel with her mother, saying "It has changed my outlook of Israel. I know as a Jewish woman how important it is for me to be connected to this culture and to this community."
Lieberman was a contestant on the season 4 Gold Medal Challenge of Champions special of American Gladiators. She was eliminated after the third event with the lowest score of the three female competitors.
On August 13, 2008, she was part of the inaugural class to be inducted into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, honoring athletes, coaches and administrators who made contributions to sports in Southeastern Virginia.
See also
List of female NBA coaches
Nancy Lieberman Award
List of select Jewish basketball players
WBCBL Professional Basketball Trailblazer Award
Notes
References
External links
Official website
Biography on Jewish Women Encyclopedia
Lieberman articles on ESPN.com
Profile on Women's basketball Hall of Fame
Profile on Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
1958 births
Living people
All-American college women's basketball players
American evangelicals
American Gladiators contestants
American men's basketball coaches
American women's basketball coaches
American women's basketball players
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players at the 1975 Pan American Games
Basketball players at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Basketball players at the 1979 Pan American Games
Basketball players from New York City
Big3 coaches
Christians from New York (state)
Converts to evangelical Christianity
Detroit Shock head coaches
Detroit Shock players
Far Rockaway High School alumni
Jewish American sportspeople
Jewish women's basketball players
Medalists at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association broadcasters
Old Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in basketball
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in basketball
Pan American Games silver medalists for the United States
People from Far Rockaway, Queens
Phoenix Mercury draft picks
Phoenix Mercury players
Point guards
Sacramento Kings assistant coaches
Sportspeople from Brooklyn
Sportspeople from Queens, New York
Texas Legends coaches
Washington Generals players
Women's National Basketball Association executives
Women sports announcers
Women's Sports Foundation executives
United States Basketball League players
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
United States women's national basketball team players
| true |
[
"Alline Banks Sprouse (June 26, 1921 – March 11, 2018) was a basketball player and is a member of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame (enshrined in 2000).\n\nEarly life\nSprouse was born in Manchester, Tennessee, United States. She played basketball while in grammar school, but when she reached high school, her local high school, Manchester High, did not have a girls team. There were family members living in Murfreesboro, about 30 miles from Manchester, so she stayed with family and attended Buchanan High which did have a girls team. At this time, the game was played on a court laid out in the same way as established by the founder of the game Senda Berenson in 1891. The rule \"divides the court into three equal sections and requires players to stay in their section\". Because Sprouse was tall for her age, and the Buchanan coaches did not know her ability, she was assigned to the center section. In fairness, Sprouse wasn't even sure she had a chance to make the team so wasn't in a position to push for the higher profile forward position. However, one of the forwards on the team came down sick and the coach was forced to give Sprouse a chance at the forward position. She scored 42 points in that game. Later, she would explain, \"From then on I was a forward\".\n\nShe was a starter for all four years of her high school career, averaging 36 points a game as a senior.\n\nAAU\n\nShe enrolled at Nashville Business College at the age of 16 before even graduating from high school to play on their AAU team. In her first year on the team she earned All-American honorable mention. In the 12 years between 1939 and 1950 she was named an All-American 11 times. In 1940, while still a teenager, Sprouse helped Nashville Business College upset the top-seeded (and defending champion) Galveston Anicos in the semi-finals. Despite losing to the Little Rock Travelers, led by Hazel Walker, in the finals, Sprouse's performance was strong enough to earn the MVP honors for the tournament. She would go on to win the MVP honors seven times.\n\nShe injured her right shoulder in one game, so seriously that she was having difficulty moving her arm. The doctor came to see her in our hotel room and informed her that she would not be able to play the next day. That wasn't acceptable to Sprouse, so she directed the doctor to tape her right arm to her body. Despite being right-handed, she played the next day with the right arm taped against her body and scored 56 points.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nWomen's Basketball Hall of Fame profile\n\n1921 births\n2018 deaths\nAmerican women's basketball players\nBasketball players from Tennessee\nCollege women's basketball players in the United States\nSmall forwards",
"Monica Falkner (born 1996) is a netball player from New Zealand. As of the end of 2021, she had represented the New Zealand national netball team on three occasions.\n\nEarly life\nMonica Falkner was born on 8 April 1996 in Ōpōtiki in the eastern Bay of Plenty in the North Island of New Zealand. Falkner is descended from the Māori people of Tūhoe and Whakatohea. She was brought up by her father on a farm in the Waimana valley of Whakatāne District in the Bay of Plenty region and attended Trident High School in Whakatāne. She started to play netball at the age of eight.\n\nNetball career\nFalkner joined the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic for the 2017 season, playing in the Goal shooter (GS) and Goal attack (GA) positions. That year she was selected to play for the New Zealand Youth Team in the 2017 Netball World Youth Cup. The tournament was won by New Zealand. She was selected for the full national squad, known as the Silver Ferns, for 2017-18 but did not play in any matches, although she did play in the 2018 Fast5 Netball World Series which New Zealand won. At the end of 2019 she suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury, a common problem for netball players, and was out of the game for 15 months. After recovering, she made her debut for the Silver Ferns in October 2020, against England in the 2020 Taini Jamison Trophy Series, being the 176th women to play for the team. For the 2021 season she joined the Northern Stars but her playing time was limited by a further injury to the same knee. She transferred to the Northern Mystics for the 2022 season.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal link\nFalkner talks of her life and career\n\n1996 births\nLiving people\nNew Zealand netball players\nNew Zealand international netball players\nWaikato Bay of Plenty Magic players\nNorthern Stars players\nNorthern Mystics players\nANZ Premiership players\nSirens Netball players\nPeople from Ōpōtiki\nNgāi Tūhoe\nWhakatōhea\nPeople educated at Trident High School"
] |
[
"Nancy Lieberman",
"Early years",
"Where did Nancy grow up?",
"Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York",
"Was she an only child?",
"she grew up with her older brother Clifford.",
"When did she start playing basketball",
"While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport.",
"Did she play in high school",
"She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore."
] |
C_b4dc60e4f5dc46bf8f87d5ea86e9aefd_1
|
Why did she not play on a team until then?
| 5 |
Why did Nancy Lieberman not play on a girls' team until sophomore year of high school?
|
Nancy Lieberman
|
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1, 1958, to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She was raised Jewish, but has become a born-again Christian. Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore. While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of only 12 slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where she brought home a gold medal Lieberman's mother, Renee, was not supportive of her daughter's passion for basketball. During one instance when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors, because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Nancy then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs. During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an AAU team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Nancy Elizabeth Lieberman (born July 1, 1958), nicknamed "Lady Magic", is an American former professional basketball player and coach in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) who is currently a broadcaster for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the head coach of Power, a team in the BIG3 which she led to its 2018 Championship. Lieberman is regarded as one of the greatest figures in American women's basketball.
In 2000, she was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame. Lieberman is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Early life
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She is Jewish (and described herself as "just a poor, skinny, redheaded Jewish girl from Queens"). Her family lived in Brooklyn when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. She lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust, and her paternal grandparents, who survived, had concentration camp numbers on their wrists.
Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
Lieberman's mother Renee was not supportive of her daughter's interest in basketball. Once, when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Lieberman then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs.
Playing career
High school career
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of the 12 coveted slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, while still in her teens, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where the team won a gold medal.
During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an Amateur Athletic Union team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles.
She told former Knick Walt Frazier that he was her hero and that it was because of him that she wore No. 10, saying: "You might not even know this, but you thought you were affecting young guys but you were affecting young, white Jewish women, not just boys."
College career
From 1976 to 1980, Lieberman attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and played on the women's basketball team there. During that time, she and her team won two consecutive AIAW National Championships (1979, 1980) and one WNIT (Women's National Invitation Tournament) Championship in 1978. She was the first two-time winner of the prestigious Wade Trophy, a national player of the year award in college women's basketball, and was selected as the Broderick Award winner for basketball as the top women's player in America. Lieberman also won three consecutive Kodak All-America awards (1978, '79, '80). Lieberman was one of six young adults to win the Young American Award from the Boy Scouts of America in 1980.
Lieberman earned the nickname "Lady Magic," a nod to Earvin "Magic" Johnson of NBA fame. Lieberman set a school record for career assists (961) that still stands today. She led the team in assists each of the four years she was on the team—in her sophomore year she averaged 8.9 per game. Lieberman amassed 2,430 points along with 1,167 rebounds in her collegiate career, producing an average of 18.1 points per game. Lieberman achieved a triple double (40 points, 15 rebounds, 11 assists) against Norfolk State in her sophomore year. Lieberman stole the ball 562 times and assisted a basket 961 times in her college career, believed to be modern records. She is the holder of several single-game and single-season records, including best free-throw shooting percentage in her freshman and sophomore years.
Lieberman earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University on May 6, 1980. She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
Professional career
In 1980 she was selected with the first pick in the Women's Pro Basketball League (WPBL) draft by the Dallas Diamonds. She helped Dallas to the 1981 WPBL finals, where they lost to the Nebraska Wranglers in five games. She was named the "rookie of the year", after averaging 26.3 points per game. Lieberman's WBL career is featured in the book Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978–1981.
In 1981, she played for the Los Angeles Lakers Summer Pro League team.
In 1984, she once again suited up for the Dallas Diamonds, signing a three-year, $250,000 contract with the team to play in the Women's American Basketball Association (WABA). Averaging 27 points per game and voted the league's Most Valuable Player, she helped Dallas win the 1984 WABA championship, but the league folded after the season. The final game played was between the Diamonds and the WABA All-Stars, where Lieberman scored 19 points and was named the game's MVP in the Diamonds' 101-94 victory.
In 1986, Lieberman signed with the Springfield Fame of the men's professional United States Basketball League (USBL) where she went on to average 1.7 points in 11 minutes per game. She remained in the league the following season, playing for the Long Island Knights. Later, she toured with the Washington Generals, who served as the regular opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters, where she met her future husband, teammate Tim Cline.
She was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1996 and to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.
In the newly formed WNBA's inaugural year in 1997, Lieberman played for the Phoenix Mercury. At the age of 39, she was the WNBA's oldest player. On July 24, 2008, at 50 years old, Lieberman signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock, breaking her own previous record as the oldest player in league history. She played one game and had two assists and two turnovers against the Houston Comets. The Comets defeated the Shock 79–61.
National team career
At age 17, Lieberman was named to the USA Basketball team roster. She played for the team in the 1975 USA Women's Pan American Team, three years younger than the next youngest teammates. The games were held in Mexico City, Mexico in October. The Pan Am team had failed to win the gold in 1967 and 1971. In 1975, the team was more successful, compiling a 7–0 record, and winning the gold medal for the first time since 1963.
Lieberman continued with the USA team to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in the first women's Olympic basketball team competition. Shortly after turning 18, Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, when the United States captured the silver medal.
Lieberman was named to the team representing the US at the 1979 William Jones Cup competition in Taipei. The USA team won all six games on the way to the gold medal. Lieberman earned a spot on the Jones Cup All-Tournament Team
Lieberman played with the team at the 1979 Pan American games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the team easily won most of their games, they lost to Cuba, 91–86, and received the silver medal.
In 1980, Lieberman earned a slot on the 1980 Olympic team, but withdrew from the squad in support of U.S. President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. She failed to make the final roster for the 1990 Goodwill Games and the 1992 Olympics.
Coaching career
WNBA
In 1998, Lieberman was hired as general manager and head coach of the WNBA's Detroit Shock. She coached for three seasons. After leaving the Shock, Lieberman worked as a women's basketball analyst on ESPN.
NBA G League
In November 2009, Lieberman became the coach of the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League (now NBA G League), an affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks, thus becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The team began play in November 2010. She later moved to a front office position with the Legends before joining Fox Sports Oklahoma as an analyst for the Oklahoma City Thunder studio show, Thunder Live.
NBA
In July 2015, she was hired by the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach, becoming the second female assistant coach in NBA history. She took two leaves of absence to care for her ailing mother before leaving the Kings in 2017. After the Kings, she became a broadcaster with the New Orleans Pelicans.
BIG3
On March 21, 2018, it was announced that Lieberman was hired as a head coach of Power in the BIG3 league, replacing Clyde Drexler. In her first season as head coach, she led her team to the 2018 Championship, defeating 3's Company to become the first ever female coach in the BIG3 to win a championship.
Career statistics
College
Source
WNBA
Regular season
Source
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 25 || 0 || 11.2 || .325 || .231 || .800 || 1.3 || 1.6 || 0.6 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 2008
| style="text-align:left;"| Detroit
| 1 || 0 || 9.0 || .000 || – || – || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0
|-
| align="left" | Career
| 2 years, 2 teams
| 26 || 0 || 11.1 || .321 || .231 || .800 || 1.2 || 1.6 || 0.5 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.5
|}
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 1 || 0 || 1.0 || – || – || – || 0.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 1.0 || 0.0 || 0.0
|}
Awards and honors
1979-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1979-The Honda-Broderick Cup winner for all sports.
1980-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1999-Inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Personal life
in 1988, Lieberman married one of her teammates with the Generals, Tim Cline, taking the surname Lieberman-Cline until the couple's divorce on March 15, 2001.
Their son Timothy Joseph or T. J., played college basketball for the Richmond Spiders, and in November 2017 signed to play for Israeli team Hapoel Holon, which plays in the Ligat HaAl, the top division of Israeli basketball.
In religious matters, despite her Jewish upbringing, Lieberman became a Christian late in her life and was described as having embraced born-again Christianity and a 2015 Jerusalem Post article. Nonetheless, she said in an interview in 2010, "I am 100% Jewish. My father's parents were deeply religious, we had two sets of silverware when we went and ate over there. My mother's side observed the major holidays. It was more relaxed. I went to Hebrew school as well." In 2011, she visited Israel with her mother, saying "It has changed my outlook of Israel. I know as a Jewish woman how important it is for me to be connected to this culture and to this community."
Lieberman was a contestant on the season 4 Gold Medal Challenge of Champions special of American Gladiators. She was eliminated after the third event with the lowest score of the three female competitors.
On August 13, 2008, she was part of the inaugural class to be inducted into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, honoring athletes, coaches and administrators who made contributions to sports in Southeastern Virginia.
See also
List of female NBA coaches
Nancy Lieberman Award
List of select Jewish basketball players
WBCBL Professional Basketball Trailblazer Award
Notes
References
External links
Official website
Biography on Jewish Women Encyclopedia
Lieberman articles on ESPN.com
Profile on Women's basketball Hall of Fame
Profile on Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
1958 births
Living people
All-American college women's basketball players
American evangelicals
American Gladiators contestants
American men's basketball coaches
American women's basketball coaches
American women's basketball players
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players at the 1975 Pan American Games
Basketball players at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Basketball players at the 1979 Pan American Games
Basketball players from New York City
Big3 coaches
Christians from New York (state)
Converts to evangelical Christianity
Detroit Shock head coaches
Detroit Shock players
Far Rockaway High School alumni
Jewish American sportspeople
Jewish women's basketball players
Medalists at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association broadcasters
Old Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in basketball
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in basketball
Pan American Games silver medalists for the United States
People from Far Rockaway, Queens
Phoenix Mercury draft picks
Phoenix Mercury players
Point guards
Sacramento Kings assistant coaches
Sportspeople from Brooklyn
Sportspeople from Queens, New York
Texas Legends coaches
Washington Generals players
Women's National Basketball Association executives
Women sports announcers
Women's Sports Foundation executives
United States Basketball League players
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
United States women's national basketball team players
| false |
[
"The 1990–91 Phoenix Suns season was the 23rd season for the Phoenix Suns in the National Basketball Association. For the season opener, the Suns traveled to Japan to play their first two games against the Utah Jazz at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, making history by being the two first teams in U.S. professional sports to play a regular season game outside of North America. The Suns got off to an 8–7 start early into the season as they traded Eddie Johnson to the Seattle SuperSonics for Xavier McDaniel. The Suns would post a 7-game winning streak as they won 17 of their next 21 games, ending the season finishing third in the Pacific Division with a 55–27 record. They would face the Jazz again in the Western Conference First Round of the playoffs, losing in four games to the 5th-seeded team.\n\nKevin Johnson and Tom Chambers were both selected for the 1991 NBA All-Star Game. Johnson led the Suns with 22.2 points, 10.1 assists and 2.1 steals per game, and was named to the All-NBA Second Team, while Chambers averaged 19.9 points and 6.4 rebounds per game. In addition, Jeff Hornacek provided the team with 16.9 points, 5.1 assists and 1.4 steals per game, while McDaniel averaged 15.8 points and 7.2 rebounds per game with the Suns after the trade, sixth man Dan Majerle contributed 13.6 points and 5.4 rebounds per game, while being named to the NBA All-Defensive Second Team, and Mark West and Andrew Lang both led the team with 2.0 blocks per game each. Following the season, McDaniel was traded to the New York Knicks.\n\nDraft picks\n\nFirst round pick Jayson Williams did not reach an agreement with team president Jerry Colangelo over his rookie contract, and after months of discussion Phoenix sent him to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for a conditional first round selection in the 1994 NBA draft. Rights to Miloš Babić were traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers for the rights of Stefano Rusconi.\n\nRoster\n\nPre-season\n\nRegular season\n\nSeason standings\n\ny – clinched division title\nx – clinched playoff spot\n\nz – clinched division title\ny – clinched division title\nx – clinched playoff spot\n\nRecord vs. opponents\n\nGame log\n\nPlayoffs\n\nGame log\n\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ffcccc\"\n| 1\n| April 25\n| Utah\n| L 90–129\n| Negele Knight (18)\n| Jeff Hornacek (5)\n| Kevin Johnson (6)\n| Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum14,487\n| 0–1\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ccffcc\"\n| 2\n| April 27\n| Utah\n| W 102–92\n| Jeff Hornacek (25)\n| Andrew Lang (8)\n| Kevin Johnson (12)\n| Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum14,487\n| 1–1\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ffcccc\"\n| 3\n| April 30\n| @ Utah\n| L 98–107\n| Tom Chambers (26)\n| Jeff Hornacek (10)\n| Kevin Johnson (10)\n| Salt Palace12,616\n| 1–2\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ffcccc\"\n| 4\n| May 2\n| @ Utah\n| L 93–101\n| Jeff Hornacek (30)\n| Tom Chambers (7)\n| Kevin Johnson (11)\n| Salt Palace12,616\n| 1–3\n|-\n\nAwards and records\n\nAll-Star Game\n Tom Chambers and Kevin Johnson were selected to play in the 1991 NBA All-Star Game, their fourth and second appearances respectively.\n\nAwards\n Kevin Johnson was selected to the All-NBA Second Team, and finished seventh in Most Valuable Player voting.\n Dan Majerle was selected to the NBA All-Defensive Second Team, and finished second in Sixth Man of the Year voting.\n\nRecords\n In a game against the Denver Nuggets on November 10, 1990, the Suns broke the NBA scoring record for a team in a half, by finishing the first two quarters ahead 107–67.\n In Game 1 of the Western Conference First Round against the Utah Jazz, Phoenix suffered their worst playoff loss in franchise history up to that point, by losing 129–90.\n\nInjuries/Missed games\n 10/30/90: Ricky Blanton: Viral infection; placed on injured list until waived on November 14\n 10/30/90: Negele Knight: Pulled hamstring; placed on injured list until November 21\n 10/30/90: Andrew Lang: Leg stress fracture; placed on injured list until November 16\n 11/03/90: Jeff Hornacek: Sore neck; did not play\n 11/07/90: Jeff Hornacek: Sore neck; did not play\n 11/16/90: Ian Lockhart: Knee, ankle injuries: placed on injured list for rest of season\n 11/21/90: Tim Perry: Sprained ankle; placed on injured list until December 5\n 12/05/90: Andrew Lang: Bruised arm; placed on injured list until December 26\n 12/26/90: Kenny Battle: Sprained ankle; placed on injured list until waived on January 23\n 01/02/91: Tom Chambers: Pulled hamstring; did not play\n 01/04/91: Tom Chambers: Pulled hamstring; did not play\n 01/05/91: Tom Chambers: Pulled hamstring; did not play\n 01/27/91: Joe Barry Carroll: Placed on suspended list until February 19\n 01/27/91: Kurt Rambis: Sprained ankle; placed on injured list until February 5\n 02/19/91: Tim Perry: Knee tendinitis; placed on injured list until March 17\n 03/17/91: Joe Barry Carroll: Sore hamstring; placed on injured list until April 21\n 04/05/91: Kevin Johnson: Strained hamstring; did not play\n 04/05/91: Dan Majerle: Injured hip; did not play\n 04/07/91: Kevin Johnson: Strained hamstring; did not play\n 04/07/91: Dan Majerle: Injured hip: did not play\n 04/09/91: Tom Chambers: Back spasms; did not play\n 04/09/91: Kevin Johnson: Strained hamstring; did not play\n 04/09/91: Dan Majerle: Spinal nerve irritation; did not play\n 04/12/91: Tom Chambers: Back spasms; did not play\n 04/12/91: Kevin Johnson: Strained hamstring; did not play\n 04/12/91: Dan Majerle: Spinal nerve irritation; did not play\n 04/14/91: Tom Chambers: Back spasms; did not play\n 04/14/91: Kevin Johnson: Strained hamstring; did not play\n 04/14/91: Dan Majerle: Spinal nerve irritation; did not play\n 04/21/91: Tim Perry: Knee tendinitis; placed on injured list for rest of season\n\nPlayer statistics\n\nSeason\n\n* – Stats with the Suns.\n+ – Minimum 50 games played.\n^ – Minimum 125 free throws made.\n\nPlayoffs\n\nTransactions\n\nTrades\n\nSee also\n 1990–91 NBA season\n\nReferences\n\nPhoenix Suns seasons",
"The 1996–97 NBA season was the 29th season for the Phoenix Suns in the National Basketball Association. During the off-season, the Suns acquired Sam Cassell, Robert Horry, Mark Bryant and Chucky Brown from the Houston Rockets, and signed free agent Rex Chapman. However, the team struggled losing their first 13 games of the season, as Kevin Johnson missed the first eleven games with a hernia injury. After an 0–8 start, head coach Cotton Fitzsimmons was replaced by former Suns guard Danny Ainge, who led the team to a 40–34 finish. Along the way, there were many in-season moves such as trading Cassell, second-year star Michael Finley and A. C. Green, to the Dallas Mavericks for future-superstar guard Jason Kidd, second-year center Loren Meyer and Tony Dumas, and sending Horry along with Joe Kleine to the Los Angeles Lakers for former Suns forward Cedric Ceballos and Rumeal Robinson, who was released to free agency after a short stint with the team. Brown was also released after playing just ten games with the team.\n\nIt was a season that would not be matched in terms of moves until both the 2014–15 and the 2015–16 seasons came and went. Still, the Suns finished fourth in the Pacific Division with a 40–42 record. This team would also be the first and only NBA team to start out the season with a 10+ losing streak, yet make it to the playoffs by the end of the season. Not only that, but they would also be the first team to record a 10+ game winning streak after recording a 10+ game losing streak earlier in the season, posting an 11-game winning streak between March and April. Johnson led the Suns with 20.1 points, 9.3 assists and 1.5 steals per game, while Chapman averaged 13.8 points per game, and sixth man Danny Manning provided the team with 13.5 points and 6.1 rebounds per game off the bench. In addition, Wesley Person contributed 13.5 points per game, and led the team with 171 three-point field goals, while Bryant provided with 9.3 points and 5.2 rebounds per game, but only played just 41 games due to injury, and Hot Rod Williams averaged 8.0 points, 8.3 rebounds and 1.3 blocks per game.\n\nAs the #7 seed in the Western Conference, the Suns faced the 2nd-seeded Seattle SuperSonics in the Western Conference First Round of the playoffs, taking a 2–1 series lead, but then losing 2–3 in a closely contested series. Following the season, Person was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Wayman Tisdale retired.\n\nOffseason\n\nNBA Draft\n\nThe Suns used their first-round pick to select point guard Steve Nash from Santa Clara. Nash averaged 14.9 points, 3.1 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game in four years with the Broncos. On July 24, the Suns signed Nash to a three-year rookie contract for $3.2 million. He would spend his first two seasons with the Suns playing a limited role behind All-Star guards Kevin Johnson and Jason Kidd, before being traded to the Dallas Mavericks in 1998. Nash would later return to the franchise as a free agent in 2004, winning consecutive MVP awards in 2005 and 2006 and ultimately making it to the Phoenix Suns Ring of Honor on October 30, 2015.\n\nThe Suns received the 39th pick from a trade with the Detroit Pistons in 1994. With the pick they would select power forward Russ Millard from Iowa. Millard averaged 10.1 points and 5.3 rebounds per game in four years with the Hawkeyes. Millard would sign with Italian club Pallacanestro Varese before the season and would never play in the NBA.\n\nThe Suns used their second-round pick to select power forward Ben Davis from Arizona. Davis averaged 12.5 points and 8.1 rebounds per game in two years with the Wildcats. On September 25, the Suns signed Davis to a one-year rookie contract for $220,000. Davis spent much of the year on the injured reserve with a finger injury. He would appear in 20 games, average 1.5 points and 1.4 rebounds in 4.9 minutes a game. Davis would sign as a free agent with the New York Knicks after the season. He would later return to the Suns shortly in the 1999–2000 season, appearing in just five games before being waived.\n\nRoster\n\nRegular season\n\nStandings\n\nRecord vs. opponents\n\nPlayoffs\nThe Suns came into the playoffs as the seventh seed, facing the 1996 Western Conference champion Seattle SuperSonics in the first round. In game one, Rex Chapman set a playoff record with 9 three-pointers, finishing the game with 42 points and leading the Suns to a 106–101 upset in Seattle. The Sonics responded with a 44-point blowout in game two, evening the series 1–1. The Suns recovered at home in game three. After an early 15-point deficit, Wesley Person led the team to a comeback 110–103 victory with 29 points and 10 rebounds. The Suns had a chance to close the series at home in game four. Behind by eleven points in the final two minutes of regulation, the Suns cut to lead to two before fouling Detlef Schrempf with 5.4 seconds remaining. Schrempf would miss the second of two free throws, giving the Sonics a 107–104 lead. Rex Chapman would respond with a famous turnaround three-pointer to send the game into overtime. The Sonics would outscore the Suns 15–8 in extra time to gain a 122–115 victory. The Suns would head back to Seattle tied 2–2 for a deciding fifth game. The Suns turned to small ball, starting four guards (Jason Kidd, Kevin Johnson, Rex Chapman and Wesley Person) along with center Hot Rod Williams. The Sonics would dominate the first half, leading by 22 at the break. A third quarter rally would bring the lead to eight, and a Wesley Person three-pointer to open the fourth quarter brought the lead to just five. But the Sonics would go on a 19–7 run in the final six minutes to claim a 116–92 victory.\n\nGame log\n\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ccffcc\"\n| 1\n| April 25\n| @ Seattle\n| W 106–101\n| Rex Chapman (42)\n| Kevin Johnson (7)\n| Jason Kidd (10)\n| KeyArena17,072\n| 1–0\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ffcccc\"\n| 2\n| April 27\n| @ Seattle\n| L 78–122\n| Rex Chapman (18)\n| Wesley Person (10)\n| Jason Kidd (8)\n| KeyArena17,072\n| 1–1\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ccffcc\"\n| 3\n| April 29\n| Seattle\n| W 110–103\n| Wesley Person (29)\n| Wesley Person (10)\n| Jason Kidd (10)\n| America West Arena19,023\n| 2–1\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ffcccc\"\n| 4\n| May 1\n| Seattle\n| L 115–122 (OT)\n| Johnson, Kidd (23)\n| Danny Manning (10)\n| Jason Kidd (14)\n| America West Arena19,023\n| 2–2\n|- align=\"center\" bgcolor=\"#ffcccc\"\n| 5\n| May 3\n| @ Seattle\n| L 92–116\n| Wesley Person (26)\n| Kidd, Person (8)\n| Jason Kidd (7)\n| KeyArena17,072\n| 2–3\n|-\n\nAwards and honors\n\nWeek/Month\nKevin Johnson was named Player of the Week for games played March 24 through March 30.\nKevin Johnson was named Player of the Month for April.\n\nAll-Star\nThis was only the third season in franchise history that the Suns were not represented in the All-Star Game, after the 1986 and 1988 seasons.\nSteve Nash was selected to compete for the Western Conference in the Rookie Challenge.\n\nSeason\nKevin Johnson finished 17th in MVP voting.\nDanny Manning finished seventh in Sixth Man of the Year voting.\n\nInjuries/Missed games\n10/31/96: Kevin Johnson: Abdominal hernia; placed on injured reserve until November 24\n10/31/96: Mark Bryant: Torn knee cartilage; placed on injured reserve until December 6\n10/31/96: Hot Rod Williams: Toe surgery; placed on injured list until November 26\n11/14/96: Sam Cassell: Flu; did not play\n11/23/96: Wayman Tisdale: Shoulder tendinitis; placed on injured list until December 30\n11/26/96: Ben Davis: Finger ligament damage; placed on injured reserve until January 12\n11/26/96: Sam Cassell: Personal reasons; did not play\n11/27/96: Sam Cassell: Personal reasons; did not play\n11/29/96: Sam Cassell: Personal reasons; did not play\n12/06/96: Darrin Hancock: Bilateral knee bruises; placed on injured reserve until waived on December 10\n12/21/96: Joe Kleine: Back spasms; did not play\n12/28/96: Kevin Johnson: Flu; did not play\n12/30/96: Tony Dumas: Injured finger; did not play\n12/30/96: Jason Kidd: Collarbone hairline fracture; placed on injured list until December 14\n01/06/97: Robert Horry: Two-game team suspension (threw towel at coach Danny Ainge); out until traded on January 10\n01/10/97: Rex Chapman: Sprained ankle; did not play\n01/12/97: Tony Dumas: Bruised knee; placed on injured list until April 20\n01/13/97: Mark Bryant: Abdominal strain; did not play\n01/13/97: Rex Chapman: Sprained ankle; did not play\n01/14/97: Mark Bryant: Abdominal strain; did not play\n01/14/97: Rex Chapman: Sprained ankle; did not play\n01/18/97: Mark Bryant: Abdominal strain; did not play\n01/29/97: Rex Chapman: Fractured finger; placed on injured reserve until March 2\n02/11/97: Hot Rod Williams: Flu; did not play\n02/26/97: Danny Manning: Sore leg; did not play\n03/02/97: Ben Davis: Injured finger; placed on injured reserve until March 13\n03/09/97: Mark Bryant: Bruised foot; did not play\n03/11/97: Mark Bryant: Bruised foot; did not play\n03/13/97: Mark Bryant: Bruised foot; did not play\n03/13/97: Loren Meyer: Strained lower back; placed on injured list until March 25\n03/17/97: Mark Bryant: Bruised foot; placed on injured reserve until April 20\n03/22/97: Cedric Ceballos: Bruised knee; did not play\n03/26/97: Cedric Ceballos: Bruised knee; did not play\n03/28/97: Cedric Ceballos: Bruised knee; did not play\n03/28/97: Wayman Tisdale: Personal reasons; did not play\n03/30/97: Wayman Tisdale: Personal reasons; did not play\n04/02/97: Wayman Tisdale: Personal reasons; did not play\n04/05/97: Ben Davis: Injured finger; placed on injured reserve until April 20\n04/15/97: Wesley Person: Flu; did not play\n04/18/97: Wesley Person: Flu; did not play\n04/19/97: Danny Manning: Injured foot; did not play\n\nPlayer statistics\n\nSeason\n\n* – Stats with the Suns.\n† – Minimum 300 field goals made.\n^ – Minimum 82 three-pointers made.\n# – Minimum 125 free throws made.\n+ – Minimum 50 games played.\n\nPlayoffs\n\n# – Minimum 10 free throws made.\n\nTransactions\n\nTrades\n\nFree agents\n\nAdditions\n\nSubtractions\n\nPlayer Transactions Citation:\n\nReferences\n\n Suns on Database Basketball\n Suns on Basketball Reference\n\n \n\nPhoenix Suns seasons"
] |
[
"Nancy Lieberman",
"Early years",
"Where did Nancy grow up?",
"Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York",
"Was she an only child?",
"she grew up with her older brother Clifford.",
"When did she start playing basketball",
"While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport.",
"Did she play in high school",
"She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.",
"Why did she not play on a team until then?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_b4dc60e4f5dc46bf8f87d5ea86e9aefd_1
|
how did her high school team do?
| 6 |
How did Nancy Lieberman high school basketball team do?
|
Nancy Lieberman
|
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1, 1958, to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She was raised Jewish, but has become a born-again Christian. Her family lived in Brooklyn, when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, New York where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was very interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore. While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of only 12 slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where she brought home a gold medal Lieberman's mother, Renee, was not supportive of her daughter's passion for basketball. During one instance when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors, because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Nancy then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs. During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an AAU team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles. CANNOTANSWER
|
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country
|
Nancy Elizabeth Lieberman (born July 1, 1958), nicknamed "Lady Magic", is an American former professional basketball player and coach in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) who is currently a broadcaster for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the head coach of Power, a team in the BIG3 which she led to its 2018 Championship. Lieberman is regarded as one of the greatest figures in American women's basketball.
In 2000, she was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame. Lieberman is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Early life
Lieberman was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jerome and Renee Lieberman. She is Jewish (and described herself as "just a poor, skinny, redheaded Jewish girl from Queens"). Her family lived in Brooklyn when she was born, but soon moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where she grew up with her older brother Clifford. She lost great-grandparents in the Holocaust, and her paternal grandparents, who survived, had concentration camp numbers on their wrists.
Her mother brought up the children after a separation and divorce. While growing up, she was interested in a variety of sports, playing baseball, softball and football with boys, before settling on basketball as her primary sport. She played basketball primarily on pickup teams with boys, not playing on a girls' team until she was a high school sophomore.
Lieberman's mother Renee was not supportive of her daughter's interest in basketball. Once, when Lieberman was practicing dribbling techniques indoors because it was cold outside, her mother demanded she stop dribbling because of all the noise. When she did not stop, her mother punctured the basketball with a screwdriver. Lieberman found another ball and continued, but her mother punctured that one as well. This continued until five balls were ruined. Lieberman then decided she had better go outside before she ran out of basketballs.
Playing career
High school career
While attending Far Rockaway High School in Queens, she established herself as one of the top women's basketball players in the country by earning one of the 12 coveted slots on the USA's National Team. In 1975, while still in her teens, Lieberman was named to the USA Team designated to play in the World Championships and Pan American Games, where the team won a gold medal.
During the school year, she played for her high school team, but in the summer, played with an Amateur Athletic Union team in Harlem, the New York Chuckles.
She told former Knick Walt Frazier that he was her hero and that it was because of him that she wore No. 10, saying: "You might not even know this, but you thought you were affecting young guys but you were affecting young, white Jewish women, not just boys."
College career
From 1976 to 1980, Lieberman attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and played on the women's basketball team there. During that time, she and her team won two consecutive AIAW National Championships (1979, 1980) and one WNIT (Women's National Invitation Tournament) Championship in 1978. She was the first two-time winner of the prestigious Wade Trophy, a national player of the year award in college women's basketball, and was selected as the Broderick Award winner for basketball as the top women's player in America. Lieberman also won three consecutive Kodak All-America awards (1978, '79, '80). Lieberman was one of six young adults to win the Young American Award from the Boy Scouts of America in 1980.
Lieberman earned the nickname "Lady Magic," a nod to Earvin "Magic" Johnson of NBA fame. Lieberman set a school record for career assists (961) that still stands today. She led the team in assists each of the four years she was on the team—in her sophomore year she averaged 8.9 per game. Lieberman amassed 2,430 points along with 1,167 rebounds in her collegiate career, producing an average of 18.1 points per game. Lieberman achieved a triple double (40 points, 15 rebounds, 11 assists) against Norfolk State in her sophomore year. Lieberman stole the ball 562 times and assisted a basket 961 times in her college career, believed to be modern records. She is the holder of several single-game and single-season records, including best free-throw shooting percentage in her freshman and sophomore years.
Lieberman earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Old Dominion University on May 6, 1980. She was inducted into the ODU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
Professional career
In 1980 she was selected with the first pick in the Women's Pro Basketball League (WPBL) draft by the Dallas Diamonds. She helped Dallas to the 1981 WPBL finals, where they lost to the Nebraska Wranglers in five games. She was named the "rookie of the year", after averaging 26.3 points per game. Lieberman's WBL career is featured in the book Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978–1981.
In 1981, she played for the Los Angeles Lakers Summer Pro League team.
In 1984, she once again suited up for the Dallas Diamonds, signing a three-year, $250,000 contract with the team to play in the Women's American Basketball Association (WABA). Averaging 27 points per game and voted the league's Most Valuable Player, she helped Dallas win the 1984 WABA championship, but the league folded after the season. The final game played was between the Diamonds and the WABA All-Stars, where Lieberman scored 19 points and was named the game's MVP in the Diamonds' 101-94 victory.
In 1986, Lieberman signed with the Springfield Fame of the men's professional United States Basketball League (USBL) where she went on to average 1.7 points in 11 minutes per game. She remained in the league the following season, playing for the Long Island Knights. Later, she toured with the Washington Generals, who served as the regular opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters, where she met her future husband, teammate Tim Cline.
She was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1996 and to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.
In the newly formed WNBA's inaugural year in 1997, Lieberman played for the Phoenix Mercury. At the age of 39, she was the WNBA's oldest player. On July 24, 2008, at 50 years old, Lieberman signed a seven-day contract with the Detroit Shock, breaking her own previous record as the oldest player in league history. She played one game and had two assists and two turnovers against the Houston Comets. The Comets defeated the Shock 79–61.
National team career
At age 17, Lieberman was named to the USA Basketball team roster. She played for the team in the 1975 USA Women's Pan American Team, three years younger than the next youngest teammates. The games were held in Mexico City, Mexico in October. The Pan Am team had failed to win the gold in 1967 and 1971. In 1975, the team was more successful, compiling a 7–0 record, and winning the gold medal for the first time since 1963.
Lieberman continued with the USA team to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in the first women's Olympic basketball team competition. Shortly after turning 18, Lieberman became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, when the United States captured the silver medal.
Lieberman was named to the team representing the US at the 1979 William Jones Cup competition in Taipei. The USA team won all six games on the way to the gold medal. Lieberman earned a spot on the Jones Cup All-Tournament Team
Lieberman played with the team at the 1979 Pan American games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the team easily won most of their games, they lost to Cuba, 91–86, and received the silver medal.
In 1980, Lieberman earned a slot on the 1980 Olympic team, but withdrew from the squad in support of U.S. President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. She failed to make the final roster for the 1990 Goodwill Games and the 1992 Olympics.
Coaching career
WNBA
In 1998, Lieberman was hired as general manager and head coach of the WNBA's Detroit Shock. She coached for three seasons. After leaving the Shock, Lieberman worked as a women's basketball analyst on ESPN.
NBA G League
In November 2009, Lieberman became the coach of the Texas Legends in the NBA Development League (now NBA G League), an affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks, thus becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's basketball team. The team began play in November 2010. She later moved to a front office position with the Legends before joining Fox Sports Oklahoma as an analyst for the Oklahoma City Thunder studio show, Thunder Live.
NBA
In July 2015, she was hired by the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach, becoming the second female assistant coach in NBA history. She took two leaves of absence to care for her ailing mother before leaving the Kings in 2017. After the Kings, she became a broadcaster with the New Orleans Pelicans.
BIG3
On March 21, 2018, it was announced that Lieberman was hired as a head coach of Power in the BIG3 league, replacing Clyde Drexler. In her first season as head coach, she led her team to the 2018 Championship, defeating 3's Company to become the first ever female coach in the BIG3 to win a championship.
Career statistics
College
Source
WNBA
Regular season
Source
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 25 || 0 || 11.2 || .325 || .231 || .800 || 1.3 || 1.6 || 0.6 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 2008
| style="text-align:left;"| Detroit
| 1 || 0 || 9.0 || .000 || – || – || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 2.0 || 0.0
|-
| align="left" | Career
| 2 years, 2 teams
| 26 || 0 || 11.1 || .321 || .231 || .800 || 1.2 || 1.6 || 0.5 || 0.1 || 1.6 || 2.5
|}
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"| 1997
| style="text-align:left;"| Phoenix
| 1 || 0 || 1.0 || – || – || – || 0.0 || 0.0 || 0.0 || 1.0 || 0.0 || 0.0
|}
Awards and honors
1979-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1979-The Honda-Broderick Cup winner for all sports.
1980-Winner of the Honda Sports Award for basketball
1999-Inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Personal life
in 1988, Lieberman married one of her teammates with the Generals, Tim Cline, taking the surname Lieberman-Cline until the couple's divorce on March 15, 2001.
Their son Timothy Joseph or T. J., played college basketball for the Richmond Spiders, and in November 2017 signed to play for Israeli team Hapoel Holon, which plays in the Ligat HaAl, the top division of Israeli basketball.
In religious matters, despite her Jewish upbringing, Lieberman became a Christian late in her life and was described as having embraced born-again Christianity and a 2015 Jerusalem Post article. Nonetheless, she said in an interview in 2010, "I am 100% Jewish. My father's parents were deeply religious, we had two sets of silverware when we went and ate over there. My mother's side observed the major holidays. It was more relaxed. I went to Hebrew school as well." In 2011, she visited Israel with her mother, saying "It has changed my outlook of Israel. I know as a Jewish woman how important it is for me to be connected to this culture and to this community."
Lieberman was a contestant on the season 4 Gold Medal Challenge of Champions special of American Gladiators. She was eliminated after the third event with the lowest score of the three female competitors.
On August 13, 2008, she was part of the inaugural class to be inducted into the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, honoring athletes, coaches and administrators who made contributions to sports in Southeastern Virginia.
See also
List of female NBA coaches
Nancy Lieberman Award
List of select Jewish basketball players
WBCBL Professional Basketball Trailblazer Award
Notes
References
External links
Official website
Biography on Jewish Women Encyclopedia
Lieberman articles on ESPN.com
Profile on Women's basketball Hall of Fame
Profile on Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
1958 births
Living people
All-American college women's basketball players
American evangelicals
American Gladiators contestants
American men's basketball coaches
American women's basketball coaches
American women's basketball players
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players at the 1975 Pan American Games
Basketball players at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Basketball players at the 1979 Pan American Games
Basketball players from New York City
Big3 coaches
Christians from New York (state)
Converts to evangelical Christianity
Detroit Shock head coaches
Detroit Shock players
Far Rockaway High School alumni
Jewish American sportspeople
Jewish women's basketball players
Medalists at the 1976 Summer Olympics
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association broadcasters
Old Dominion Lady Monarchs basketball players
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in basketball
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in basketball
Pan American Games silver medalists for the United States
People from Far Rockaway, Queens
Phoenix Mercury draft picks
Phoenix Mercury players
Point guards
Sacramento Kings assistant coaches
Sportspeople from Brooklyn
Sportspeople from Queens, New York
Texas Legends coaches
Washington Generals players
Women's National Basketball Association executives
Women sports announcers
Women's Sports Foundation executives
United States Basketball League players
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
United States women's national basketball team players
| false |
[
"There's a Girl in My Hammerlock is a 1991 young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli.\n\nPlot\nMaisie Potter tries out for the wrestling team in her junior high to get close to a boy she likes, but she soon finds out that what she really loves is the sport of wrestling.\n\nMaisie initially wants to be on the cheerleading squad, but she did not make the cut during tryouts. She is infatuated with a boy at her school, Eric Delong, and will do anything to be near him. Because he tries out for the wrestling team, Maisie decides to try out too. She makes the team but discovers that wrestling is a lot harder than she initially thought. She wins some of her matches but most of her opponents forfeit because they don't think it's right for a girl to wrestle a boy. She has to decide if she should do things that other people want her to do or things that she truly wants to do and is good at.\n\nExternal links\nAuthor Jerry Spinelli's homepage\n\n1991 American novels\nNovels by Jerry Spinelli\nAmerican sports novels\nAmerican young adult novels",
"The Migraine Disability Assessment Test (MIDAS) is a test used by doctors to determine how severely migraines affect a patient's life. Patients are asked questions about the frequency and duration of their headaches, as well as how often these headaches limited their ability to participate in activities at work, at school, or at home.\n\nThe test was evaluated by the professional journal Neurology in 2001; it was found to be both reliable and valid.\n\nQuestions\nThe MIDAS contains the following questions:\n\n On how many days in the last 3 months did you miss work or school because of your headaches?\n How many days in the last 3 months was your productivity at work or school reduced by half or more because of your headaches? (Do not include days you counted in question 1 where you missed work or school.)\n On how many days in the last 3 months did you not do household work because of your headaches?\n How many days in the last three months was your productivity in household work reduced by half of more because of your headaches? (Do not include days you counted in question 3 where you did not do household work.)\n On how many days in the last 3 months did you miss family, social or leisure activities because of your headaches?\n\nThe patient's score consists of the total of these five questions. Additionally, there is a section for patients to share with their doctors:\n\nWhat your Physician will need to know about your headache:\n\nA. On how many days in the last 3 months did you have a headache?\n(If a headache lasted more than 1 day, count each day.)\t\n\nB. On a scale of 0 - 10, on average how painful were these headaches? \n(where 0 = no pain at all and 10 = pain as bad as it can be.)\n\nScoring\nOnce scored, the test gives the patient an idea of how debilitating his/her migraines are based on this scale:\n\n0 to 5, MIDAS Grade I, Little or no disability \n\n6 to 10, MIDAS Grade II, Mild disability\n\n11 to 20, MIDAS Grade III, Moderate disability\n\n21+, MIDAS Grade IV, Severe disability\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nMigraine Treatment\n\nMigraine"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film"
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
| 1 |
Did Cameron Crowe write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| true |
[
"Ridgemont may refer to:\n\nRidgemont, Oakland, California, a neighborhood in Oakland, California\nRidgemont (Pittsburgh), a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania\nRidgemont High School (Ottawa)\nFast Times at Ridgemont High, a 1982 film starring Sean Penn\n\nSee also\nRidgmont, a village in Bedfordshire in England",
"Love Rules may refer to:\n\n\"Love Rules\", a song by Don Henley for soundtrack of 1982 American film Fast Times at Ridgemont High\nLove Rules!, 2004 American ABC Family comedy film\nLove Rules (album), 2010 album by Carolyn Dawn Johnson"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,"
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
When did he write the book?
| 2 |
When did Cameron Crowe write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
came out in 1981.
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| true |
[
"Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman is an unauthorized 1994 biography of Pamela Harriman by Christopher Ogden.\n\nBackground\nThe author stated that he chose to write the book anyway after Harriman canceled plans for an authorized biography and did not pay him for the work he did. Kirkus Reviews stated \"That may or may not have influenced his perspective when he decided to write the story anyway\".\n\nOgden had, over a period of several months, collected about forty hours of interview footage.\n\nOgden was a correspondent for Time.\n\nContent\nThere are nineteen chapters, with most of them each being named after a male figure with significance in the biography.\n\nKirkus stated that the author had a negative view of her romantic ties, and according to Kirkus this was not primarily about any promiscuity but instead about allowing her partners to give her support.\n\nReception\nKirkus Reviews stated that \" This is fun to read as the names drop, but it offers more titillation than insight into\" the subject.\n\nPublishers Weekly stated that the book is \"captivating, gossipy, withering\".\n\nReferences\n\n1994 non-fiction books\nUnauthorized biographies",
"True Story: A Novel is a book by Bill Maher. It was Maher's first book, and his only novel. It was first published in 1994 by Random House and was published in 2000 by Simon & Schuster. The book is an episodic novel detailing the true accounts of Maher and other stand-up comics in the late 1970s and early 1980s.\n\nProduction\nMaher began writing True Story while he was working in comedy clubs, shortly after graduating from Cornell University with a degree in English. {{Quote|I did have a deep desire to write one novel. I always believed from my English studies that most novelists wrote one great novel and then pretty much wrote the same one over and over. So I thought I'd just write one.|Bill Maher}}\n\nReception\nRichard Bernstein from The New York Times gave a mixed to favourable review, stating \"when True Story works, it works because of Mr. Maher's energetic intelligence and his creation of characters whose prolonged sophomorism has distinct qualities\", as did Raw Sawhill from The New York Times'', who stated that whilst the first half of the book seemed like \"an underdramatized blur\", Maher \"comes through with a handful of well-conceived scenes\" in its second half.\n\nReferences\n\n1994 American novels\nRandom House books\n1994 debut novels"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,",
"When did he write the book?",
"came out in 1981."
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
Was it popular?
| 3 |
Was Fast Times at Ridgemont High popular?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| false |
[
"Diário Popular was a Portuguese language daily newspaper published in Lisbon, Portugal, between 1942 and 1990.\n\nHistory and profile\nDiário Popular was first published on 22 September 1942. Its headquarters was in Lisbon. The paper was one of two Portuguese newspapers published in Angola during the colonial rule. The other was Jornal de Notícias. In the 1960s Diário Popular was acquired by the Balsemão family.\n\nDiário Popular was the organizer of the first journalism program in Portugal which was held in 1966. In the late 1960s the paper was acquired by the Quina group, a family company. In 1971 it was one of two Portuguese best-selling newspapers.\n\nDiário Popular belonged to the Banco Borges and Irmão, a bank, before the Carnation revolution. The paper was nationalized following the revolution in 1974 along with other private dailies and publications. It was controlled by the communists and adopted a communist stance in October 1975. In May 1978 the paper had a left-wing political stance.\n\nDiário Popular sold 73,000 copies in October 1975 and 66,000 copies in May 1978.\n\nDiário Popular was privatized in 1989 and was acquired by a company, Projectos e Estudos de Imprensa (PEI), which also became the owner of the sports paper Record. The company was headed by Pedro Santana Lopes, a member of the Social Democratic Party. The paper ceased publication in 1990.\n\nSee also\n List of newspapers in Portugal\n\nReferences\n\n1942 establishments in Portugal\n1990 disestablishments in Portugal\nPopular\nNewspapers published in Lisbon\nNewspapers established in 1942\nPopular\nPublications disestablished in 1990",
"CPB Bank was the Greek branch of Cyprus Popular Bank.\nThe bank was founded under the name Marfin Egnatia Bank. It was formed by the consolidation of Marfin Investment Group's Egnatia, Laiki and Marfin Banks and was a 95%-owned subsidiary of Marfin Popular Bank (later renamed to Cyprus Popular Bank).\nIn 2011 it was converted to a branch of Cyprus Popular Bank.\nIn early 2013, the bank was renamed Laiki Bank only to change its name once again in March of the same year to CPB Bank.\nOn 26 March 2013 its liabilities and assets were bought by Piraeus Bank.\n\nReferences\n\nDefunct banks of Greece\nBanks disestablished in 2013"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,",
"When did he write the book?",
"came out in 1981.",
"Was it popular?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
When did it get made into a movie?
| 4 |
When did Fast Times at Ridgemont High get made into a movie?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
Released in 1982, the movie version
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| true |
[
"How Did This Get Made? (HDTGM) is a podcast on the Earwolf network. It is hosted by Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas. Each episode, which typically has a different guest, features the deconstruction and mockery of outlandish and bad films.\n\nFormat\nThe hosts and guest make jokes about the films as well as attempt to unscramble plots. After discussing the film, Scheer reads \"second opinions\" in the form of five-star reviews posted online by Amazon.com users. The hosts also often make recommendations on if the film is worth watching. The show is released every two weeks.\n\nDuring the show's off week a \".5\" episode (also known as a \"minisode\") is uploaded. These episodes feature Scheer's \"explanation hopeline\" where he answers questions from fans who call in, the movie for the next week is announced, Scheer reads corrections and omissions from the message board regarding last week's episode, and he opens fan mail and provides his recommendations on books, movies, TV shows etc. that he is enjoying.\n\nSome full episodes are recorded in front of a live audience and include a question and answer session and original \"second opinion\" theme songs sung by fans. Not all content from the live shows is included in the final released episode - about 30 minutes of each live show is edited out.\n\nHistory\nHow Did This Get Made? began after Scheer and Raphael saw the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Later, the pair talked to Mantzoukas about the movie and joked about the idea for starting a bad movie podcast. , Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has never been covered on the podcast.\n\nAwards\nIn 2019, How Did This Get Made? won a Webby Award in the category of Podcasts – Television & Film.\n\nIn 2020, How Did This Get Made? won an iHeartRadio award in the category of Best TV & Film Podcast.\n\nIn 2022, How Did This Get Made? won an iHeartRadio award in the category of Best TV & Film Podcast.\n\nSpinoffs\n\nHow Did This Get Made?: Origin Stories\nBetween February and September 2017, a 17-episode spin-off series of the podcast was released. Entitled How Did This Get Made?: Origin Stories, author Blake J. Harris would interview people involved with the movies discussed on the podcast. Guests on the show included director Mel Brooks, who served as executive producer on Solarbabies, and screenwriter Dan Gordon, who wrote Surf Ninjas.\n\nUnspooled\nIn May 2018, Scheer began a new podcast with Amy Nicholson titled Unspooled that is also devoted to movies. Unlike HDTGM?, however, Unspooled looks at films deemed good enough for the updated 2007 edition of the AFI Top 100. This is often referenced in How Did This Get Made? by Mantzoukas and Raphael, who are comically annoyed at how they were not invited to host the podcast, instead being subjected to the bad films that HDTGM covers.\n\nHow Did This Get Played?\nIn June 2019, the Earwolf network launched the podcast How Did This Get Played?, hosted by Doughboys host Nick Wiger and former Saturday Night Live writer Heather Anne Campbell. The podcast is positioned as the video game equivalent of HDTGM?, where Wiger and Campbell review widely panned video games.\n\nEpisodes\n\nAdaptation\nThe program was adapted in France in 2014 under the title 2 heures de perdues (http://www.2hdp.fr/ and available on Spotify and iTunes), a podcast in which several friends meet to analyze bad films in the same style (mainly American, French, and British films). The show then ends with a reading of comments found on AlloCiné (biggest French-speaking cinema website) or Amazon.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n How Did This Get Made on Earwolf\n\nAudio podcasts\nEarwolf\nFilm and television podcasts\nComedy and humor podcasts\n2010 podcast debuts",
"How Did This Get Made? is a comedy podcast on the Earwolf network hosted by Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas.\n\nGenerally, How Did This Get Made? is released every two weeks. During the show's off-week, a \".5\" episode is uploaded featuring Scheer announcing the next week's movie, as well as challenges for the fans. In addition to the shows and mini-shows, the How Did This Get Made? stream hosted the first three episodes of Bitch Sesh, the podcast of previous guests Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider, in December 2015. It has also hosted episodes of its own spin-off podcast, the How Did This Get Made? Origin Stories, in which Blake Harris interviews people involved with the films covered by the main show. In December 2017, an episode was recorded for the Pee Cast Blast event, and released exclusively on Stitcher Premium.\n\nEvery episode has featured Paul Scheer as the host of the podcast. The only episode to date in which Scheer hosted remotely was The Smurfs, in which he Skyped in. Raphael has taken extended breaks from the podcast for both filming commitments and maternity leave. Mantzoukas has also missed episodes due to work, but has also Skyped in for various episodes. On the occasions that neither Raphael nor Mantzoukas are available for live appearances, Scheer calls in previous fan-favorite guests for what is known as a How Did This Get Made? All-Stars episode.\n\nList of episodes\n\nMini episodes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n List of How Did This Get Made? episodes\n\nHow Did This Get Made\nHow Did This Get Made"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,",
"When did he write the book?",
"came out in 1981.",
"Was it popular?",
"I don't know.",
"When did it get made into a movie?",
"Released in 1982, the movie version"
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
Who starred in the movie?
| 5 |
Who starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
featured no major name stars.
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| true |
[
"John \"Johnny\" DeLuca (born April 25, 1986) is an American actor and singer who is known for his role as Butchy in the Disney Channel Original Movie, Teen Beach Movie, as well as its sequel Teen Beach 2, and as Anthony in coming-of-age comedy Staten Island Summer. He also guest starred with Maia Mitchell on an episode of Disney Channel's show, Jessie, along with a guest appearance on Wizards of Waverly Place.\n\nEarly life \nDeLuca was born in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, the eldest of 3 boys. Growing up, DeLuca was an athlete. In his senior year of high school, DeLuca decided to try out for high school production of The Wizard of Oz, where he auditioned for the role of Scarecrow. After he got the part, he decided to pursue acting. He graduated from Longmeadow High School. DeLuca is a graduate of Fordham University in New York where he was a Theatre major.\n\nCareer \nIn 2009, DeLuca had his acting and TV debut, when he guest starred in shows Ugly Betty and 30 Rock. In 2011, he guest starred in TV shows Lights Out and Wizards of Waverly Place. That same year he also starred as Bucky Buchanan in Disney Channel unsold pilot Zombies and Cheerleaders. In early 2012, DeLuca guest starred in an episode of The Secret Life of the American Teenager.\n\nIn 2012, DeLuca had a film debut in We Made This Movie, where he played the role of Jeff. Later, he guest-starred in an episode of Sketchy. In December 2012, he had a role as Colin Hemingway in the indie drama movie Hemingway. In early 2013, DeLuca guest starred with Maia Mitchell on Disney show Jessie. In 2013, he landed the role of Butchy in a hit Disney Channel Original Movie, Teen Beach Movie. The movie was directed by Jeffrey Hornaday and earned 13.5 million total viewers on Disney Channel. He played the role of Butchy, the leader of the biker gang in the movie within the movie. Also in 2013, DeLuca had a recurring role in the TV series Twisted, as Cole Farell. He had a role in short film It Remains.\n\nIn 2014, he guest starred on an episode of Instant Mom. In 2015, DeLuca reprised his role as Butchy, leader of the biker gang, in the Disney Channel Original Movie, Teen Beach 2 sequel to the hit movie Teen Beach Movie. The film was directed by Jeffrey Hornaday and premiered to 7.5 million total viewers on Disney Channel. He had a main role in coming-of-age comedy Staten Island Summer as Anthony DiBuono, Italian lifeguard who dreams of joining the Navy. The film was directed by Rhys Thomas and written by Colin Jost and had a limited release in theater before premiering worldwide on Netflix on July 30, 2015.\n\nOn April 4, 2016, it was announced that DeLuca had joined the cast of ABC's soap opera, General Hospital. His character, Aaron Roland, started recurring on April 27, 2016. DeLuca guest starred in multiple season 4 episodes as Jeremy in Hulu's drama East Los High. He played the role of Brett in web released short films Free Period. The short films were released on Disney Channel's YouTube page.\n\nHe starred as Chet in the family friendly gymnastic movie Chalk It Up alongside Maddy Curley and Nikki SooHoo. The movie was released on September 13, 2016 on iTunes, Amazon and Google Play. He also starred as Wade in the family friendly movie All Halloes' Eve co-starring Lexi Giovagnoli and Ashley Argota. The movie was released on digital hd on September 27, 2016. On October 6, 2016 DeLuca guest starred in an episode of How to Get Away with Murder. He also guest starred in an episode of Comrade Detective, where he voiced the character Young Nikita.\n\nIn 2017, he starred as Maverick in the short film Lara Croft Is My Girlfriend alongside his then girlfriend Lidia Rivera. Later that year, he also appeared as Bobby in the Go90's romantic comedy series Relationship Status. DeLuca guest starred as Billy in the horror web series Welcome To Daisyland. He also guest starred as Rod in an episode of FX's American Horror Story: 1984. DeLuca had a supporting role as Davey Wallace in Hallmark Channel Original Movie A Merry Christmas Match opposite Lindsey Gort. He guest starred as Vinny Linguini (voice) in Disney's Muppet Babies.\n\nIn 2020, DeLuca played the supporting role of Mario in the independent thriller Spree, which had its world premiere on January 24, 2020 at Sundance Film Festival. He starred as Josh Grant in the Lifetime original movie Killer Dream Home alongside Maiara Walsh. In 2021, he played the role of Bobby in the comedy film Donny's Bar Mitzvah.\n\nFilmography\n\nFilm\n\nTelevision\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nDiscography\n\nSoundtrack albums\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n \n \n \n\n1986 births\nLiving people\nAmerican male film actors\nAmerican male television actors\nPeople from Longmeadow, Massachusetts\nFordham University alumni",
"Randy Wayne Frederick (born August 7, 1981) is an American actor.\n\nLife and career\nWayne was born and raised in Moore, Oklahoma. He attended Moore High School and Campbellsville University.\n\nHe appeared on the 2002 season of the British reality show Shipwrecked, which led to guest appearances on the television shows The Closer, Huff, NCIS, Jack & Bobby, and Numbers as well as a series regular role as the not-so-bright teenager Jeff Fenton on the 2006 ABC sitcom Sons & Daughters. In 2006, Wayne starred as Robbie Zirpollo in the movie The Surfer King.\n\nHe is most famous for his portrayal of Luke Duke in the movie The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning. Since then he has starred in numerous independent features including the gay-themed drama Dream Boy, Grizzly Park, and Foreign Exchange. He also portrayed Michael in The Haunting of Molly Hartley, The Last Hurrah, and Ghost Town (a 2009 Syfy Channel horror film, not to be confused with the 2008 Ricky Gervais film of the same name). He starred in the lead role of Jake Taylor in To Save a Life, which was released to theaters on January 22, 2010. Wayne also starred as Duffy in the movie Frat Party.\n\nHe starred opposite Matthew Modine in the 20th Century Fox movie, The Trial, released in 2010. His latest appearance was on Talent, a web series from the producers of Pretty Little Liars, as Gabe on www.thetalentshow.com. He also guest starred on The Secret Life of the American Teenager as Frank for four episodes. Wayne also appeared on The Lying Game as Justin Miller, a boy that Laurel was seriously dating but broke up with because he was using Laurel to get revenge on her father, Ted, a surgeon who operated on his mother that died on the operating table.\n\nIn 2011, Wayne starred as Dick in the movie Cougar Hunting. He also starred in the 2011 movie Honey 2 co-starring Katerina Graham. In 2011 he played a side character named 'Matt' in HBO's True Blood for two episodes. In 2012, Wayne starred as a young skater named Caleb in the movie Hardflip. He also starred as Johnny in the horror film Hold Your Breath co-starring Katrina Bowden. Wayne had a role as Luke in the movie Heart of the Country. In 2013, he starred as Cyrus Rothwell in the crime film The Freemason. In 2014, Wayne had roles in movies Android Cop, where he played role of Android Cop and Mantervention.\n\nIn 2015, Wayne starred as Mike in the horror film Paranormal Island co-starring Briana Evigan. He also starred as Joel Gilbert in the family friendly film The Ivy League Farmer. In 2016, Wayne starred as Collin Jenkins in the thriller film Cassidy Way co-starring Christopher Rich. He starred as Thomas J. Ryan in the history drama film Union Bound. He had supporting roles as Graham in the romantic comedy Accidentally Engaged and as Oliver in thriller The Last Bid. In 2017, he starred as Johnny Taylor in the thriller film Death Pool. That year, he also starred as Jeff in the horror movie Escape Room. He also had a supporting role as Scott Schaeffer in the Hallmark Christmas movie Enchanted Christmas.\n\nWayne had a recurring role as Matthew Johnson in the season 3 of the web series The Bay. He also had a supporting role as Detective Jake Dark in the film Paint It Red. He starred as Stephen in the short film It Happened Again Last Night alongside Gabrielle Stone. Wayne had a supporting role as Detective Jacobs in the film Cops and Robbers. In 2018, Wayne played the role of David Carter in the direct-to-video horror film Hellraiser: Judgment.\n\nPersonal life\nWayne confirmed via his Twitter account that he voted for Donald Trump during the 2020 United States presidential election.\n\nFilmography\n\nFilm\n\nTelevision\n\nWeb\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1981 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Moore, Oklahoma\nMale actors from Oklahoma\nAmerican male film actors\nAmerican male television actors\nCampbellsville University alumni"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,",
"When did he write the book?",
"came out in 1981.",
"Was it popular?",
"I don't know.",
"When did it get made into a movie?",
"Released in 1982, the movie version",
"Who starred in the movie?",
"featured no major name stars."
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 6 |
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article besides Fast Times at Ridgemont High featuring no major name stars?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences.
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| false |
[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,",
"When did he write the book?",
"came out in 1981.",
"Was it popular?",
"I don't know.",
"When did it get made into a movie?",
"Released in 1982, the movie version",
"Who starred in the movie?",
"featured no major name stars.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences."
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
How long was he undercover?
| 7 |
How long was Cameron Crowe undercover?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
Reliving the senior year he never had,
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| true |
[
"Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is an open world action-adventure video game developed by TT Fusion, that was released on the Nintendo 3DS in April 2013. Unlike previous Lego titles developed by Traveller's Tales, which have been based on various licenses, the game is based on the Lego City brand and was published by Nintendo. It serves as a prequel to Lego City Undercover.\n\nPlot\nIn the year 2011, Chase McCain, a rookie cop working for the Lego City Police Department, has one objective in his mind: to put the most wanted man, Rex Fury, into jail.\n\nAs far as story connections go, it was Chase who accidentally revealed that Natalia Kowalski, his girlfriend who previously worked as a news reporter turned out to be the secret witness in the Rex trial, which forced her to go under witness protection. As a result, Chase was eventually exiled from Lego City, but not before he attempted to fix his mistakes by pursuing Rex and the criminals that work for him. It also outlines how Chase managed to arrest Rex Fury. Furthermore, the game reveals that Mayor Gleeson, a character also featured in Lego City Undercover, was formerly the chief of police, and how Chief Dunby was just a deputy officer.\n\nDevelopment\nThe game was announced during Nintendo's press conference at E3 2011 on 7 June 2011 with the tentative name Lego City Stories. On 17 January 2013, the game was revealed to be Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins, and that it would be a prequel to the Wii U game.\n\nReception\n\nLego City Undercover: The Chase Begins received mixed reviews with aggregate scores of 64% from GameRankings and 65/100 from Metacritic. IGN gave it 6.3/10, calling it a \"decent\" game that is marred by \"a lot of fog, a lot of loading, no voice acting and a jarring framerate\".\n\nLiam Martin of Digital Spy gave the game 3 out of 5 stars, commenting on the game's lack of appeal but praising the game's visuals and stating that \"Unfortunately, where LEGO City Undercover referenced movies and used voice acting to great effect, hardware limitations have forced TT Fusion to keep spoken cutscenes to a minimum, something which ultimately detracts from the hilarity. Despite its flaws, LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins is a charming release, packed with diverse missions, mostly impressive visuals and a great cast of characters.\"\n\nChris Scullion of Official Nintendo Magazine gave the game 64% out of 100, commenting on the amount of cutbacks from the Wii U sequel (Undercover), stating that \"The Chase Begins has far less funnier bones than Undercover. The silly jokes, clever spoofs and brilliant dialogue between the characters have been replaced with a handful of average cutscenes and loads of text-heavy dialogue which, while functional, are rarely amusing and never hilarious. Loading times were frustrating enough in LEGO City: Undercover but are even more infuriating here considering the game's running off a cartridge and is designed for handheld play. It's lacking visually, too. Thick fog (to hide having to render distant buildings) smothers the city and roads and pavements are far less crowded, making it feel like you're wandering around a post-apocalyptic LEGO City. The characters' faces don't move, making in-game cutscenes feel awkward and the frame rate is clunky if you're playing in 3D. It's technically impressive(ish), but not as fun or funny as the Wii U game.\"\n\nOn 12 September 2013, Nintendo announced that the game has sold 264,000 units in North America.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n2013 video games\nCity Undercover: The Chase Begins\nOpen-world video games\nNintendo games\nNintendo 3DS games\nNintendo 3DS-only games\nVideo game prequels\nNintendo 3DS eShop games\nTraveller's Tales games\nVideo games about police officers\nVideo games developed in the United Kingdom\n3D platform games\nVideo games set in 2011",
"Around the end of 2010 and during 2011, it was disclosed in UK media that a number of undercover police officers had, as part of their 'false persona', entered into intimate relationships with members of targeted groups and in some cases proposed marriage or fathered children with protesters who were unaware their partner was a police officer in a role as part of their official duties. Various legal actions followed, including eight women who took action against the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), stating they were deceived into long-term intimate relationships by five officers, including Mark Kennedy, the first officer to be identified as such, who was publicly identified on 21 October 2010 as infiltrating social and environmental justice campaigns, and Mark Kennedy himself who claimed in turn that he had been incompetently handled by his superiors and denied psychological counselling. According to The Guardian, Kennedy sued the police for ruining his life and failing to \"protect\" him from falling in love with one of the environmental activists whose movement he infiltrated.\n\nAlthough the units had been previously disbanded, other cases continued to emerge. In 2015 the public Undercover Policing Inquiry under a senior judge was announced. In November 2015 the Metropolitan Police published an unreserved apology in which it exonerated and apologised to those women who had been deceived and stated the methodology had constituted abuse and a \"gross violation\" with severely harmful effects, as part of a settlement of their cases. In 2016 new cases continued to come to light.\n\nBackground \nMark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and Flash) is a former London Metropolitan Police officer who, whilst attached to the police service's National Public Order Intelligence Unit, (NPOIU) infiltrated many protest groups between 2003 and 2010 before he was unmasked by political activists as an undercover policeman on 21 October 2010. In January 2011, it was reported that Kennedy worked for several years as an undercover infiltrator for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit with seven years work in the environmental protest movement.\n\nDuring this time he had entered into intimate relationships on false grounds, which came to light during 2010 as being part of a systemic pattern of exploitation and manipulation of women in such movements. It also emerged that some of these undercover police relationships had resulted in children whose fathers later \"vanished\" when their role was completed.\n\nOther related undercover controversies \nIt later emerged that Kennedy had previously undertaken criminal acts as part of his role for other countries, including Denmark where he stated that, in the guise of an environmental activist, he was used by the police forces of 22 countries and was responsible for the closing down of the Youth House community centre in Copenhagen, and in Germany, for German police, including arson. German MP Andrej Hunko raised questions in the German Bundestag concerning what the German authorities knew about Kennedy's activities amongst the Berlin protest movement. Kennedy had been arrested in Berlin for attempted arson, but was never brought to trial. Hunko also asked: \"How does the federal government justify the fact that [Mark Kennedy], as part of his operation in Germany, did not only initiate long-term meaningful friendships but also sexual relationships, clearly under false pretenses?\" The German government refused to answer all questions relating to Kennedy.\n\nThe use of undercover officers also caused the collapse of trials and led to the revelation of unlawful withholding of evidence by the Crown Prosecution Service. Six activists accused of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass at Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station collapsed following the revelation of undercover police involvement, in which the police were described as having been not just observers, but agent provocateurs: \"We're not talking about someone sitting at the back of the meeting taking notes - he was in the thick of it.\"\n\nCrown Prosecution Service (CPS) barrister Felicity Gerry was forced to withdraw the case against the activists after Kennedy confessed to the set-up, evidence of which the CPS had withheld from the defence. The CPS also withheld the fact that Kennedy was giving testimony under the false name Mark Stone using a false passport supplied by the police. Secret tapes \"that could have exonerated six activists, known as the \"deniers\" because they claimed not to have agreed to join the protest\" and \"evidence gathered by the Guardian now suggests it was the Crown Prosecution Service rather than the police that withheld the tapes.\" CPS lawyer Ian Cunningham faced dismissal after a report by Sir Christopher Rose criticised Cunningham for failing to ask questions about Kennedy’s involvement in the Ratcliffe plot.\n\nImpact, Inquiry and aftermath of disclosures \nAs of 2016 the legal cases continue. In November 2015 the Metropolitan Police force apologised to seven women \"tricked into relationships\" over a period of 25 years by officers in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The officers involved had eventually \"vanished\", leaving questions and deceit behind, described by victims as \"psychological torture\". Financial settlements estimated at £3 million for the seven claimants were also made as part of the settlement.\n\nThe disclosures also led to the closing of the units concerned, and a public inquiry, the Undercover Policing Inquiry, concerning the conduct of police in undercover operations. The inquiry is headed by senior judge Lord Justice Pitchford, a Lord Justice of Appeal and member of the Privy Council. One group representing victims of such practices is the Undercover Research Group, whose website provides alternative coverage and comments on the inquiry.\n\nAs of April 2018 the inquiry has confirmed that undercover police had infiltrated the following groups and movements:\n\nAnarchist groups, Animal Liberation Front, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Anti-Fascist Action, Big Flame, Black Power movement, Brixton Hunt Saboteurs, Colin Roach Centre, Dambusters Mobilising Committee, Dissent!, Earth First!, Essex Hunt Saboteurs, Friends of Freedom Press Ltd, Globalise Resistance, Independent Labour Party, Independent Working Class Association, International Marxist Group, International Socialists, Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front, London Animal Action, London Animal Rights Coalition, London Boots Action Group, London Greenpeace, Militant, No Platform, Antifa, Operation Omega, Reclaim the Streets, Red Action, Republican Forum, Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation, Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, South London Animal Movement (SLAM), Tri-Continental, Troops Out Movement, Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, West London Hunt Saboteurs, Workers Revolutionary Party, Young Haganah, Young Liberals, Youth against Racism in Europe.\n\nFormer policeman Andy Coles was elected in 2015 as a Conservative councillor on Peterborough City Council and appointed a deputy to the Cambridgeshire Police and Crime Commissioner in 2016. After a mention in his younger brother Richard Coles' autobiography, he was accused of having deceived a 19-year-old political activist into a sexual relationship while he was a 32-year-old undercover police officer in the 1990s. In February 1995 the then Detective Sergeant Coles wrote the \"Tradecraft manual for undercover police\". He resigned as deputy commissioner on 15 May 2017 but remains a councillor and school governor.\n\nEventually at least 12 women received compensation from the police in the High Court of Justice, though the police avoided making internal documents about the relationships public.\n\nInvestigatory Powers Tribunal trial\nKate Wilson, one of the women who had sued the police in the high court over the relationship with undercover officer Mark Kennedy, started a case in 2018 at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, alleging the police had infringed her human rights in five ways. In court documents, the police admitted that Kennedy’s line manager and other officers were aware of the sexual relationship, stating \"sexual relationship with [Wilson] was carried out with the acquiescence of his cover officers and line manager\". Previously the police had suggested such relationships were not officially sanctioned.\n\nScope for criminal charges\nRape in English law is defined as \"unlawful sexual intercourse with a woman who (a) at the time of the intercourse does not consent to it, and (b) at that time he knows that she does not consent to the intercourse or he is reckless as to whether she consents to it.\" The basis of a prosecution therefore revolves around whether or not consent is given in law, or its absence was ignored.\n\nThe CPS statement clarified that misrepresenting identity, and obtaining sexual consent due to a false identity, was not generally a crime in UK law, other than in specific situations such as impersonating a person's partner, or deceit as to gender. Other than in specific limited situations set out in statute, the general rule in UK law is that deceit only creates a case of rape (known as \"rape by deception\" or \"rape by fraud\") if \"the act consented to was not the act undertaken\". Crown Prosecutors declined to bring charges against any police officers or their supervisors, including charges for rape and other sexual crimes (covering sex under false pretences, unconsented sexual acts, and other potential offences), on the basis that rape charges would be unlikely to succeed. For similar reasons, indecent assault, procurement for sexual intercourse by false pretences, and misconduct in office were also felt to lack sufficient basis for a conviction. A leading case on \"rape by fraud\" is R v Linekar, in which the Court of Appeal had previously held that very narrow restrictions should apply to such cases of deceit in the context of rape prosecutions. (The reasoning being that otherwise rape could be alleged following any minor broken promise or any misrepresentation with sexual activity, and would risk no longer being a uniformly serious offence.)\n\nPolice response\nIn November 2015, the Metropolitan Police Service issue the following statement:\n\nVictims' ongoing concerns\nIn January 2016, further cases continued to come to light. A complainant stated that they sought disclosure of the cover names of officers who were engaged undercover in this way, and their supervising officers, so that those who had been deceived into relationships, and potentially suffered thereby, would be able to discover the fact.\n\nChanges to UK undercover policing practices \nAt present, the inquiry is in process and the final report not yet created; the sole known impact on police practice is the above statement combined with the alleged disbanding of the units involved.\n\nSee also \n Covert policing in the United Kingdom\n Undercover\n Agent provocateur\n Rape in English law\n Consent (criminal law)#Consent obtained by deception\n Bob Lambert (undercover police officer)\n Cuban Five - other intelligence officers whose relationships with unsuspecting victims resulted in litigation\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police, Rob Evans, Paul Lewis (Guardian Books, Faber & Faber, 2012) \n What Spycops Did Next, article by Merrick Badger (Real Media, January 2017)\n\nExternal links \n Undercover Research Group article on how one such undercover officer in a relationship was determined to be a police officer \"after the fact\".\n Undercover Research Group post: \"15 signs\" suggesting a person may have been an undercover police operative\n Official website of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.\n\nLaw enforcement scandals\nSurveillance scandals\nLaw enforcement techniques\nLaw enforcement in the United Kingdom\nControversies in the United Kingdom\nScandals in the United Kingdom\nSex scandals\n2015 scandals\n2015 in the United Kingdom"
] |
[
"Cameron Crowe",
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film",
"Did he write Fast Times at Ridgemont High?",
"His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story,",
"When did he write the book?",
"came out in 1981.",
"Was it popular?",
"I don't know.",
"When did it get made into a movie?",
"Released in 1982, the movie version",
"Who starred in the movie?",
"featured no major name stars.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences.",
"How long was he undercover?",
"Reliving the senior year he never had,"
] |
C_2ca59977d66d4742939232f443ceda41_1
|
Is that where he got inspiration for his book?
| 8 |
Is posing undercover as a high school student where Cameron Crowe got inspiration for his book?
|
Cameron Crowe
|
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. Crowe appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book. At the age of 22, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the true essence of the high school experience. His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings--at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs--and focused on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters. Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth. The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.
Early life
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California. His father, James A. Crowe, originally from Kentucky, was a real estate agent. His mother, Alice Marie (née George), "was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire who did skits around the house and would wear a clown suit to school on special occasions." She worked as a psychology professor and in family therapy and often participated in peace demonstrations and causes relating to the rights of farm workers. Crowe's grandfather was Greek. Crowe was the youngest of three children with two sisters; one died when he was young. The family moved around often but spent a lot of time in the desert town of Indio, California. Crowe commented that Indio was where "people owned tortoises, not dogs". His family finally settled in San Diego.
Crowe skipped kindergarten and two grades in elementary school, and by the time he attended Catholic high school, he was quite a bit younger than the other students. To add to his alienation, he was often ill because he suffered from nephritis.
Crowe began writing for the school newspaper and by the age of 13 was contributing music reviews for an underground publication, The San Diego Door. He began corresponding with music journalist Lester Bangs, who had left the Door to become editor at the national rock magazine Creem, and soon he was also submitting articles to Creem as well as Circus. Crowe graduated from the University of San Diego High School in 1972 at the age of 15. On a trip to Los Angeles, he met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. He also joined the Rolling Stone staff as a contributing editor and became an associate editor. During this time, Crowe interviewed Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Poco, Steely Dan, members of Led Zeppelin and more. Crowe was Rolling Stones youngest-ever contributor.
Career
Rolling Stone
Crowe's first cover story was on the Allman Brothers Band. He went on the road with them for three weeks at the age of 16 and interviewed the band and the road crew.
Because Crowe was a fan of the 1970s hard rock bands that the older writers disliked, he landed a lot of major interviews. He wrote predominantly about Yes, and also about Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Fleetwood Mac, and others. Former colleague Sarah Lazin described of the youthful Crowe: "He was a pleasure to work with, a total professional. He was easygoing and eager to learn. Obviously, the bands loved him." Then-senior editor Ben Fong-Torres also said of Crowe: "He was the guy we sent out after some difficult customers. He covered the bands that hated Rolling Stone."<ref>'</ref>
Fast Times at Ridgemont High book and film
When Rolling Stone moved its offices from California to New York in 1977, Crowe decided to stay behind. He also felt the excitement of his career was beginning to wane. He appeared in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, but returned to his writing. Though he would continue to freelance for Rolling Stone on and off over the years, he turned his attention to a book.
At the age of 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high school experience.
His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming and graduation as well as social cliques and sexual encounters.
Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie version lacked a specific plot and featured no major name stars. The studio did not devote any marketing effort toward it. It became a sleeper hit due to word of mouth.
The reviews of Fast Times at Ridgemont High were positive, and the film ended up launching the careers of some of the previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.
Early film efforts
Following this success, Crowe wrote the screenplay for 1984's The Wild Life, the pseudo-sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Whereas its predecessor followed teenagers' lives in high school, The Wild Life traced the lives of several teenagers after high school living in an apartment complex. Filmmaker James L. Brooks noticed Crowe's original voice and wanted to work with him. Brooks executive produced Crowe's first directing effort, 1989's Say Anything..., about a young man pining away for the affections of the seemingly perfect girl. Say Anything... was positively received by critics.
By this point, Crowe was ready to leave teen angst behind and focus on his peers. His next project, 1992's Singles, described the romantic tangles among a group of six friends in their twenties in Seattle. The film starred Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon, where Fonda played a coffee-bar waitress fawning over an aspiring musician, played by Dillon. Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott co-starred as a couple wavering on whether to commit to each other. Music forms an integral backbone for the script, and the soundtrack became a best seller three months before the release of the film. Much of this was due to repeated delays while studio executives debated how to market it.Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because it was too costly to buy the rights. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band 'Citizen Dick'. He also appeared in this project, as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With ... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."
Jerry Maguire
Branching into a new direction, Crowe wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, about a highly paid pro sports agent, inspired by sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Maguire is fired after having a moral revelation, writing and distributing a mission statement calling for sincere service to the athletes and less money for the agency. He strikes out to form his own agency. Tom Cruise played the title role of Jerry and Cuba Gooding, Jr. played Rod Tidwell, an aging wide receiver, whose catchphrase, "Show me the money!", became ubiquitous for a time. Renée Zellweger appeared as an accountant, who sets aside her job security to follow Maguire's charismatic moral aspiration, in both work and love. Gooding won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, and the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor (for Cruise). Cruise also won his second Golden Globe for his role as Jerry.
Almost Famous
In 2000, Crowe used his music journalism experience roots to write and direct Almost Famous, about the experiences of a teenage music journalist who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970s. The film starred newcomer Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the baby-faced writer who finds himself immersed in the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and Kate Hudson co-starred as Penny Lane, a prominent groupie, or, as the film refers to her, a "Band-Aid". Digging into his most personal memories, Crowe used a composite of the bands he had known to come up with Stillwater, the emerging act that welcomes the young journalist into its sphere, then becomes wary of his intentions. Seventies rocker Peter Frampton served as a technical consultant on the film.
William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's own mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home, and in real life, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still estranged to a degree when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.
In addition, Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and also gave him rights to four of their other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all of the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.
Vanilla Sky
Crowe followed Almost Famous with the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky in 2001. The film, starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, received mixed reviews, yet managed to gross $100.6 million at the US box office, making it his second highest grossing directorial effort behind Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Sofia is played by Penélope Cruz in both Amenabar's original movie and Crowe's remake.
Elizabethtown
In 2005, Crowe directed the romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, which opened to mixed reviews, scoring 45 on Metacritic, the same as his previous effort, Vanilla Sky.
The Union
In November 2009, he began filming a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album The Union, a collaboration between musicians Elton John and Leon Russell produced by award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett. The documentary features musicians Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph, Don Was and a 10-piece gospel choir who all appear on the album with John and Russell. Musician Stevie Nicks and John's longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin also appear. On March 2, 2011, the documentary was announced to open the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.
We Bought a Zoo
With production on Aloha delayed, Crowe set his next feature, the family comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo, based on Benjamin Mee's memoir of the same name. He collaborated with The Devil Wears Prada writer Aline Brosh McKenna on the screenplay. The book's story follows Mee, who buys and moves into a dilapidated zoo (now Dartmoor Zoological Park) in the English countryside. Looking for a fresh start along with his seven-year-old daughter and his troubled fourteen-year-old son, he hopes to refurbish the zoo and run it and to give his children what he calls an "adventure". Crowe changed the location to the United States. The film received a wide release on December 23, 2011, by 20th Century Fox, and starred Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. It received mixed reviews. The film music was composed by Jonsi.
Pearl Jam Twenty
In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said "... our manager Kelly has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready also stated in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron’s writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was being shot . A trailer for the movie, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and also had an accompanying book and soundtrack.
Aloha
It was announced in early June 2008 that Crowe would return to write and direct his seventh feature film, initially titled Deep Tiki and Volcano Romance, set to star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon, and to be released by Columbia Pictures. Filming was expected to begin in January 2009, but this was then postponed.
The project resurfaced in 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski and Danny McBride joined the cast of the film; filming began in Hawaii in September 2013. The film's final title was Aloha and it was released on May 29, 2015 by Sony Pictures to negative critical reviews.
Roadies
On June 26, 2016, Crowe's comedy-drama series Roadies'' premiered on the Showtime television channel. The show, starring Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino and Imogen Poots, tells the story of a colorful road crew who work behind the scenes for a fictional rock band, The Staton-House Band. The pilot episode was written and directed by Crowe, as well as the series finale.
Personal life
Crowe married Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart in July 1986. Their twin sons were born in January 2000. Crowe and Wilson separated in June 2008 and Wilson filed for divorce on September 23, 2010, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on December 8, 2010.
Filmography
As an actor
Music videos
Awards and nominations received by Crowe movies
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American male bloggers
American bloggers
American film producers
American music critics
American music journalists
American male screenwriters
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Businesspeople from San Diego
Grammy Award winners
Film directors from California
Writers from Palm Springs, California
Writers from San Diego
American music video directors
Rolling Stone people
People from Indio, California
Screenwriters from California
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
| false |
[
"Calvin Luk is an Australian automotive designer working for BMW AG. He is one of the youngest exterior designers for BMW group. He has worked for BMW since 2008.\n\nLuk is an Australian of Hong Kong descent. He got his automotive inspiration from his parent's E36 BMW 3 series. He also gets inspiration from listening to Nickleback.\n\nEducation \n\nCalvin studied first at the University of Technology Sydney before applying to the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena after getting advice from a BMW executive. He majored in transportation design.\n\nNotable Work \nLuk is known for his work on the BMW X1 F48 design, the BMW 1 Series F20 LCI exterior design, the BMW X3 G01 exterior design, and the BMW Z4 Concept.\n\nReferences \n\nBMW designers\nLiving people\nUniversity of Technology Sydney alumni\nArt Center College of Design alumni\n1985 births",
"Asshole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Shit About You is a 2008 spoof self-help book and memoir by American author Martin Kihn. The book's title in the U.S. was modified to A$$hole: How I Got Rich & Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone & How You Can, Too.\n\nContent\n\nThe first line of Marty Kihn's book, is \"I was the nicest guy in the world and it was killing me.\" Kihn, who works for a marketing company, is told by his boss that unless he started \"playing hardball\", they were going to demote him and upgrade a colleague Kihn calls \"The Nemesis\" to a window office. So to save his career, Kihn decides to turn himself into an asshole, and in telling his story, he describes exactly how the reader can follow his lead.\n\nTo become an asshole, Kihn builds a team, consisting of an acting coach, life coach and both personal and dog trainer – to help \"master the art of assholism.\" Kihn then creates a ten-step \"assholism\" program which involves \"ignoring other peoples’ feelings, never saying sorry, dressing in black silk and only eating red meat.\" Other tasks saw Kihn signing up to the National Rifle Association, learning kickboxing, screaming at colleagues and eating garlic bagels on public transport. Additionally, Kihn takes inspiration from famous figures whom he considers \"assholes\" such as: Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Martha Stewart, David Letterman, Ayn Rand, Nicole Kidman, Niccolò Machiavelli, Scarface and Paris Hilton. He also takes inspiration from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and The Virtue of Selfishness.\n\nIn speaking on his motivations for compiling the work, Kihn stated: \n\nIn the end, he is successful. By \"finding the balls to act like an asshole, he crushes The Nemesis\", gets a promotion, then nets a large sum of cash, and a second home into the bargain, by selling the book to Hollywood for a six-figure sum. Warner Brothers also paid $500,000 for the film rights to his memoirs before he'd even written them.\n\nMartin Kihn’s Ten Steps to Becoming An Asshole\n\nReviews\nIn reviewing the work, Booklist remarked that \"Kihn's got a great ear for dialogue - and a comedic sense worthy of Second City\", while Publishers Weekly stated that \"like an above-average Adam Sandler movie, this mix of racy humor and overt sentiment will probably get both a bigger audience, and less credit, than it deserves.\"\n\nRobert Sutton, author of New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule gave the book a positive review, declaring \"A$$hole is one of the funniest books I've ever read, and \"remarkably useful in a sick sort of way.\" Additionally, Rory Freeman, co-author of The New York Times bestseller Skinny Bitch, described the text as \"remarkably profane, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly sentimental\", while John Alexander, author of How To Become an Alpha Male, opined that \"through humor and vivid storytelling, Martin Kihn takes you through that journey until he discovers an astonishing lesson.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Text Preview via Google Books\n Martin Kihn Parody Infomercial for A$$hole\n Original Theme Song for the Book ~ \"Too Nice Asshole\"\n Video: Martin Kihn on Fox Business with Anna Gilligan\n Make Enemies and Alienate People by Brian Braiker, Newsweek magazine, April 14, 2008\n Isn't It Ironic - Not? by Martin Kihn, The Huffington Post, May 21, 2008\n\n2008 books\nSatirical self-help books\nParody books"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans"
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
was richard involved in the crusades
| 1 |
Was Richard I of England involved in the Crusades?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| true |
[
"The History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land was a two-volume work published in 1820 by Charles Mills. It criticized David Hume and Edward Gibbon. Mills grouped the Crusades into nine entities:\n\n First Crusade and Crusade of 1101\n Second Crusade\n Third Crusade\n Crusade of 1197\n Fourth Crusade\n Fifth Crusade and Sixth Crusade\n Baron's Crusade\n Seventh Crusade\n Eighth Crusade and Lord Edward's Crusade.\n\nMills' work was not as dominant in his country as was that of Joseph François Michaud and Friedrich Wilken in theirs. Mills’ history also used the theme of the role of Richard I (the Lionheart) as a crusading and royal English parallel to Louis IX. His successors opened discussion in England of the Crusades as precursors of modern colonization, with a strong tinge of British Christian Zionism.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nhttps://web.archive.org/web/20051109203701/http://www.fpri.org/orbis/4801/peters.firanj.html\nHistory of the Crusades at the Internet Archive\n\n1820 non-fiction books\nBooks about the Crusades\nHistoriography of the Crusades\nEnglish non-fiction books",
"The Revue de l'Orient Latin is a 12-volume set of medieval documents which was published from 1893–1911. It was a continuation of the Archives de l'Orient Latin, two volumes of which were published from 1881–1884. Various medieval documents and letters from the sets are often cited in scholarly works about the Crusades. The Revue is often abbreviated ROL and the \"Archives\" are abbreviated AOL, but often the two groups of documents are referred to together.\n\nThe Archives were published in Paris. The Revue was the official journal of the archaeological foundation \"Société de l'Orient latin\" founded in 1875 by Count Paul Riant (1836–1888), and was published at the society's headquarters in Geneva. Initial publications were divided into geographical and historical series. The geographical portions contained the itineraries of pilgrims. The historical series included chronicles, letters, and charters.\n\nSee also\n Text publication society\n\nReferences\n\n Jean Richard, \"The Société de l'Orient Latin described by its founder\", in Bulletin of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East 4, 1984, 19-22\n\nExternal links\n Worldcat listing for \"Revue de l'Orient Latin\"\n Worldcat list for \"Archives de l'Orient latin\"\n Periodicals Service Company\n Catholic Encyclopedia - \"Crusades (Sources and Bibliography)\"\n \"Nomen Omen: Paul Riant (1836-88) and Scandinavian Crusading Studies\"\n Revue de l'Orient Latin at Gallica (1893-1902 only)\n\n1881 establishments in France\n1911 disestablishments in France\nDefunct literary magazines published in France\nFrench-language magazines\nHistory magazines\nHistoriography of the Crusades\nMagazines established in 1881\nMagazines disestablished in 1911\nMagazines published in Paris\nMedieval literature"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army."
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
how many people were there
| 2 |
How many people were there in Richard I's crusader army?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| false |
[
"Buddhism in Finland represents a very small percentage of that nation's religious practices. In 2015 there were estimated less than 10 000 followers of Buddhism in Finland. It's, however, hard to evaluate the exact amount of the Buddhists as many donations officially belong to a religious congregation and some of them are registered as associations rather than congregations. Furthermore, it's hard to say how many people are born into the religion and how many converts there are. \n\nThe world's northernmost stupa, and the only one in Finland, is located in Siikainen.\n\nThere are Buddhist centers and temples throughout the country. In total there are around 40 different organisations. For example Diamond Way Buddhism Finland has four centers in Helsinki, Lahti, Tampere and Turku. The very first Buddhist monastery, Liên Tâm Monastery, in Finland was inaugurated in Moisio in 2015. Another monastery was founded in Kuopio in 2019.\n\nFinnish Buddhist Union is loosely organized umbrella organisation of different Buddhist associations and congregations in Finland.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Buddhism and Nordland\n The Early History of Buddhism in Finland Parts I & II by Alpo Ratia\nBuddhalaisuus.fi\n\nFin \nBud\n\nBuddhism in Finland",
"Filipino-American Art includes art and music forms done by Filipino Americans. It has been growing in number in 2016. Filipino Americans are starting to be known for art, singing and even dancing. As we go back in history like Americans, Filipinos have been using the form of art to express themselves, to tell a story about their ancestors, to give a voice to those who feel like they do not have a voice or the right to speak up. Filipino American Artist also uses all types of art to have this sense of belonging and identity. Going back to history the Philippines was taken over by America and Spain, and since then some believe they do not know who they exactly are. Filipino Americans struggle to find their own identity, because like all Asian Americans they are looked down upon because there would be people who categorize them as only “Filipino” but there are other people who can also categorize them as only \"American\". This stigma results in identity loss, not being able to know where you belong and how to fit in. But with the help of different forms of art it gives the opportunity for Filipino Americans to be in touch with their Filipino roots as well as their American roots.\n\nFilipino-American identity and hip hop \nFor many years hip hop has been an outlet for anyone who felt like they needed to express themselves or a calling to those who have felt oppressed. Filipino Americans throughout history have always been at some sort of identity crisis. “If this history is not remembered or associated with the experiences of Filipino Americans today, the colonizers’ historical records favor U.S. exceptionalism by not recognizing a pattern of white supremacy and imperialism.” (Bischoff) He explains that throughout history all we learn about is American history, and African American history etc. but you really do not see a huge chunk of Filipino American history. We do not hear about how America took over the Philippines, or how Spain and America worked together to fool the Philippines. Even education was not up to the Filipinos, America sent people to teach Filipinos the history of the Americans. So it is not a huge surprise when Filipinos migrate to the United States where they do not know who they are.\n\nHip hop plays a huge role into this identity crisis. Young Filipino Americans are affected mostly because of this because of all the racial comments they get from people. Hip-Hop has been put out there originating from African Americans rapping about how they were oppressed, or how they have been segregated for too long. Filipino Americans also used this as an outlet to talk about their issues with society. In the book \"Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan\" Viola talks about how Hip-Hop in general talks about the movements that has been made, it replicates the feelings that people had, how strongly they felt about what mattered to them the most. Hip-Hop is this form of expression that put what people wanted to fight for in a form of expression where everybody and anybody could listen to it. Filipino Americans also used Hip-hop to talk about how they are present now, that we are not the same as every Asian American, there are many different races and ethnicities and we have different backgrounds, different cultures than the different races.\n\nBlack Eyed Peas \nOne of the most popular groups in music history was “The Black Eyed Peas” One of their founding members Apl.de.ap or previously known as Allan Pineda, is a Filipino American. He was born in the Philippines but came to the United States as he grew up. In the United States he quickly found Taboo, and Wil.I.am; together they formed a group but soon enough fell apart due to personal reasons. All members were going through issues that affected their group so they fell apart. Apl soon realized that there were many problems that he had to face: he could not send money to his family back home, as well as his brother committing suicide. He eventually went back to the Philippines to finally remember his roots. He had forgotten what it was like to be back and to see all the hardships and struggles people go through everyday to make a living. He finally came out with a song called “The ALP Song” in the lyrics you could clearly hear that he is talking about the hardships he saw in the Philippines “How would you feel if you had to catch your meal, Build a hut to live and to eat and chill in, Having to pump the water outta the ground?” (Devitt) This is just a prime example of Filipino Americans using their voice and talents to shed light on Filipino history and struggles faced in every day lives. As time went on he formed a new group called the Black Eyed Peas, he then also came up with a new song called \"Bebot\" which means \"chick\" in English. He also sheds light on the Filipino communities and cultures they have. He talks about the dishes that Filipinos are widely known for like chicken adobo, “pan de sal” which is Filipino bread, as well as \"balut\" which is a fertilized bird egg. This was history changing because we saw that people are starting to be more aware of their cultural and Filipino roots because The Black Eyed Peas started to use their voice, and fame to make people more aware of issues that are not really talked about in everyday lives.\n\nFilipino American dancers \nAs there are many Filipino American artists singing wise there are also many Filipino American dancers. With many forms of expression dancing is definitely another outlet to express how Filipino American people feel. Filipino Americans started using dance as a form of letting loose as early as the 1920s. Filipino Americans started going to taxi dance halls where Filipino men were allowed to showcase their dancing abilities as well as socialize with women. This was one of the first times where Filipino Americans did not feel oppressed, and that they can be as equal as the other races. These men were praised by many people and this was a start of something new.\n\nFast forwarding to today we have many uprising Filipino American dancers who express themselves. Shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and “America’s Best Dance Crew” gave many people opportunities to showcase their dancing abilities. In the bunch of dance crews and people who competed in the years. There were many Filipino Americans who have competed and won. Dtrix (Dominic Sandoval), Ryanimay Conferido are some of the few who have competed for “So You Think You Can Dance” but also have combined their skills to have won season three of “America’s Best Dance Crew” with their dance crew “Quest Crew.” Another famous dance crew who predominantly is made of many Filipino Americans is a crew called “The Jabbawockeez” who was the first ever dance crew to win ABDC. These are just a few of the many and talented Filipino Americans who use their talents to express themselves as well as inspire other young Filipino Americans to follow their dreams.\n\nFilipino American artists \nAnother form of expression used to showcase Filipino American pride is the sense of art itself. There have been many eras where art shined. Eras like Surrealism, Cubism were made popular by Pablo Picasso. Each era so different from the other because it depended on what was going on in history and how the artist himself felt. How does this relate to Filipino American Artistry? Like Picasso Filipino-American artist, Paul Pfeiffer created an art piece called “Leviathan” which is basically a painting that depicts many blonde wigs coming out of a frame. The hidden meaning to this art piece is that he wanted to show how having the western look/American look was a Filipino American’s dream, to look like the people on TV as well as be like them. Paul wanted to depict it like this because it shows how the wigs are everywhere but also is a metaphor because while people were so obsessed with being like the Westerners, Filipino history was never told and forgotten. America hid the cruel things they have done to the Filipinos. Picasso used his art to show how he felt at the time, and in each era he felt something different the same goes with Paul Pfeiffer he created in art piece that shows how he felt about Filipino American history. How he felt about Filipino Americans giving in to Western culture as well as the untold history of the Philippines. There are many more artists as well as art pieces who empower the Filipino American.\n\nPilipino cultural night \nPilipino Cultural Night (PCN) is an event that Filipino American students have made up to stage in touch with their roots, and although there is not a specific person who is well known for PCNs. It is a huge factor in Filipino American’s (as well as other people who are not Filipino American) expression and another way for them to keep in touch with their family and friend’s roots. PCNs were dance, song, and art forms all in one event. They allowed students to learn about their forgotten and unspoken history. Students around the nation have adapted the idea of a PCN. PCN dates all the way back to 1980 in California where a group of students were curious about their cultural roots. Today PCNs are performed all over the United States educating everyone on Filipino culture.\n\nIn PCNs there are usually four suites that base the performances. The four suites Rural, Cordillera, Tribal, and Muslim. In each suite you see how different they are. Each suite contains many different dances that tell a different part of history of the Philippines. This is important because Filipino American students that put on these performances not only tell the story of our ancestors but they are also educated on the struggles and hardships they faced. PCN is included in Filipino American Artists because students pay tribute to the Pilipino history, you do not have to be famous and well-known nationally in order to show your support for the Filipino American history.\n\nIn Filipino-American performances, many dances are theatrically altered versions of rituals and dances. Although criticized by some, PCN's were created for the community at-large to receive information they never did before, whether it be about Filipino history, dances, rituals, or Fil-Am experiences. Dances such as \"Sarimanok\", \"Tahing\", and \"Mumbaki\" tell the stories of rituals performed in the Philippines. Mumbaki depicts the ritual of priests praying to the god for a successful harvest.\n\nSkeptics \nOver time there seems to be a pattern on the fame Filipino American Artists. Some may believe that fame Filipino Americans get are based on their ethnicity instead of their talent. Famous artists like Charice Pempengco rose to fame when people saw her internet videos on YouTube giving her millions of hits. She was then flown to America where she guest appeared on major TV shows like Ellen, Oprah and Glee. While being interviewed on Oprah you saw that she was questioned more about how she was Filipino coming to America rather than her music abilities. On Glee she played Sunshine Corazon a transfer student from the Philippines, she played a stereotypical Filipina. This brings to the table are Filipinos famous for their abilities or because they are Filipino. People may have different opinions.\n\nReferences\n\nFilipino-American culture"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know."
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
when did they go on a crusade
| 3 |
When did Richard I go on a crusade?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
1188
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| true |
[
"\n\nEvents\nBertran d'Alamanon criticises Charles of Anjou for planning to go on Crusade when he ought to be making good his claim on Provence\n\nBirths\n Philippe de Rémi (died 1296), French jurist, royal official and poet\n\nDeaths\n\n13th-century poetry\nPoetry",
"Terra Sancti Christi is a papal bull issued by Pope Innocent IV on 23 January 1245 calling for a crusade to the Holy Land. In December 1244 Louis IX of France had declared his intention to go on a crusade to the Holy Land and in February Innocent ordered the Franciscans to preach in favour of it.\n\nNotes\n\n13th-century papal bulls\nDocuments of Pope Innocent IV"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know.",
"when did they go on a crusade",
"1188"
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
where did they go
| 4 |
Where did Richard I's crusader army go?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
on the Third Crusade,
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| true |
[
"Where Did They Go is a 1971 album by Peggy Lee. It was arranged and conducted by Don Sebesky and Al Capps.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Where Did They Go\" (Harry Lloyd, Gloria Sklerov) - 3:53\n\"My Rock and Foundation\" (Burt Bacharach, Hal David) - 2:37\n\"Help Me Make It Through the Night\" (Kris Kristofferson) - 2:45\n\"All I Want\" (Steve Clayton [aka P. Tedesco], Gladys Shelley) - 2:40\n\"I Don't Know How to Love Him\" (Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber) - 3:24\n\"Goodbye Again\" (Donald J. Addrissi, Richard P. Addrissi) - 2:33\n\"Sing\" (Joe Raposo) - 2:25\n\"I Was Born in Love with You\" (Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, Michel Legrand) - 4:01\n\"Losing My Mind\" (Stephen Sondheim) - 2:43\n\"My Sweet Lord\" (George Harrison) - 2:55\n\nNotes\nThe recording sessions for this album took place at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood, California.\n\nWhere Did They Go was Peggy Lee's first album not to make the Billboard 200 chart since her Grammy-winning hit \"Is That All There Is?\" in 1969.\n\nBurt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the song \"My Rock And Foundation\" specifically for Lee.\n\nCapitol Records released \"Where Did They Go\" (backed by \"All I Want\") as a 45\" single in 1971. The single did not make the charts.\n\nLee performed songs from this album, including \"Where Did They Go\" and \"My Sweet Lord,\" during her June 1971 engagement at The Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.\n\nAfter completing work on Where Did They Go, Peggy Lee did not return to the recording studio again until nearly a year later, when she began recording Norma Deloris Egstrom from Jamestown, North Dakota in April 1972.\n\nThis album was released on 8-track, along with LP.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Peggy Lee Discography\n\n1971 albums\nCapitol Records albums\nPeggy Lee albums\nAlbums arranged by Don Sebesky\nAlbums produced by Snuff Garrett",
"Where Did We Go Wrong may refer to:\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\" (Dondria song), 2010\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\" (Toni Braxton and Babyface song), 2013\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a song by Petula Clark from the album My Love\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a song by Diana Ross from the album Ross\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a 1980 song by Frankie Valli"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know.",
"when did they go on a crusade",
"1188",
"where did they go",
"on the Third Crusade,"
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
what countries did they go to
| 5 |
What countries did Richard I's crusader army go to?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
London if I
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| true |
[
"Visa requirements for Uzbekistan citizens are administrative entry restrictions by the authorities of other states placed on citizens of Uzbekistan. The article is concerning ordinary passport holders and tourists. As of 5 January 2021, 25 visa-free countries and 33 visa-on-arrival countries, as a result, ranking the Uzbekistan passport 91st in terms of travel freedom according to the Henley Passport Index.\n\nExit visas\nAll Uzbek citizens were required to obtain an exit visa to travel to all non-CIS countries from 1995 until 2019. An exit visa was not needed for trips to CIS countries as long as the travelers did not then go to a non-CIS country. Penalties for traveling to non-CIS countries without an exit visa included heavy fines and prison terms up to 10 years in length. Exit visas were obtained from the Interior Ministry's local OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration) department, and were valid for two years.\n\nUzbek immigration authorities did not allow Uzbek citizens to board outbound flights without a valid visa for the destination country and/or a return ticket even if the destination country grants visa on arrival to Uzbek passport holders. As a result, Uzbek citizens had to go to the immigration counter at Tashkent International Airport for an approval and a stamp on their tickets before they proceeded to a check-in counter.\n\nThe exit visa requirement was abolished on 1 January 2019 after a presidential decree signed in August 2017 came into force.\n\nVisa requirements map\n\nVisa requirements\n\nSee also \n\n Visa policy of Uzbekistan\n Uzbekistan passport\n\nReferences and Notes\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nUzbekistan\nVisa_requirements_for_Uzbekistan_citizens",
"Wait Till Next Year is a 1988 memoir by sportswriter Mike Lupica and screenwriter William Goldman.\n\nThe book is similar to Goldman's earlier effort The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway in that it looks at a year of New York sports teams with Goldman getting press passes to see a huge number of games. The main focus is looking at The Mets following up their championship season while taking in the local Basketball and American Football teams too in a wildly frenetic overview of the coaches, stars, owners, trades and controversies that the season provided.\n\nLupica and Goldman had been friends for thirty years when Lupica suggested to Goldman they collaborate on a book together, from his point of view and Goldman's point of view. Goldman:\nI wanted to be a sports columnist when I was a kid and then I learned more about what they did for a living and I decided I didn't want to do it. You have to go see all that shit. It's fun to go to a ball game occasionally. What was great, the year I did the book with Lupica, was I had press passes so I could go sit with all those people whose columns I read and watch a baseball game or a football game or a basketball game.\nGoldman said they would do alternate chapters. \"I would eventually show him what I had and he would show me what he had but for the most part, we kept away from each other. We'd talk all the time.\"\n\nGoldman said the book \"was a total flop - it didn't work commercially - but it was a wonderful time for me.\"\n\nReferences\n\nEgan, Sean, William Goldman: The Reluctant Storyteller, Bear Manor Media 2014\n\nAmerican memoirs\n1988 non-fiction books\nBooks by William Goldman"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know.",
"when did they go on a crusade",
"1188",
"where did they go",
"on the Third Crusade,",
"what countries did they go to",
"London if I"
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
where in the world were the crusades
| 6 |
Where in the world did the crusades occur?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| false |
[
"The Crusades Through Arab Eyes () is a French language historical essay by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf.\n\nAs the name suggests, the book is a narrative retelling of primary sources drawn from various Arab chronicles that seeks to provide an Arab perspective on the Crusades, and especially regarding the Crusaders – the (Franj), as the Arabs called them – who were considered cruel, savage, ignorant and culturally backward.\n\nFrom the first invasion in the eleventh century through till the general collapse of the Crusades in the thirteenth century, the book constructs a narrative that is the reverse of that common in the Western world, describing the main facts as bellicose and displaying situations of a quaint historic setting, where Western Christians are viewed as \"barbarians,\" and unaware of the most elementary rules of honor, dignity and social ethics.\n\nReferences\n\n \n\nBooks about the Crusades\n1984 non-fiction books\nWorks by Amin Maalouf\nArab history\nFrench non-fiction books",
"The list of modern historians of the Crusades identifies those authors of histories of the Crusades from the 20th century through the present whose works are widely read. This is a continuation of the list of later historians of the Crusades which discusses historians from the 13th century through the end of the 19th century. That list was, in turn a continuation of the list of sources for the Crusades and the list of collections of Crusader sources. Two good references for these biographies are available. The first is The Routledge Companion to the Crusades by historian Peter Lock. The second is the Historians of the Crusades (2007–2008), an on-line database of scholars working in the field of Crusader studies.\n\nEarly Twentieth Century\n\nHistorians from the early part of the 20th century include the following.\n\nJ. B. Bury. John Bagnell (J. B.) Bury (1861–1927), an Anglo-Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman (Byzantine) historian and philologist.\n\n Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 volumes (1898). A new edition, edited and with notes by J. B. Bury.\n The Cambridge Medieval History, 8 volumes (1911–1936). Planned by J .B. Bury.\n The Eastern Roman Empire 717–1453 (1923). Volume 4 of the Cambridge Medieval History.\n\nTranslations and Reprints from the Original Sources of History. Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of History, 6 volumes (1901). A collection published by the University of Pennsylvania that includes articles by Dana C. Munro on Urban II, letters from the Crusaders and the Fourth Crusade.\n\nBiographies. A number of biographies of Crusader figures were published in the 20th century, including the following:\n\n The Ancestry and Life of Godfrey of Bouillon (1947). By John Andressohn.\n Bohemond I, Prince of Antioch (1917). By Ralph Yewdale.\n Raymond IV, count of Toulouse. By John Hugh Hill and Laurita Lyttleton Hill.\n Robert II of Flanders in the First Crusade (1928). By M. M. Knappen.\n Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (1920). By Charles W. Davis.\n\nJoseph Delaville Le Roulx. Joseph Delaville Le Roulx (1855–1911), a French historian specializing on the Knights Hospitaller (Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem).\n\n Les Hospitaliers à Rhodes, 1310–1421 (1874).\n Documents concernant les Templiers extraits des archives de Malte (1882).\n Les archives la bibliothèque et le trésor de l'Ordre de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem à Malte (1883). The archives the library and treasury of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in Malta.\n La France en Orient au xive siècle: expéditions du maréchal Boucicaut. (1885). An account of the travels of French marshal Jean II Le Maingre (1366–1421), known as Boucicaut, a knight renown for his martial skills and chivalry. He was the sole participant in the Crusade of Marchal Boucicaut to Constantinople in 1399.\n Cartulaire général de l'Ordre des Hospitaliers, 4 volumes (1894-1904). Collection edited by le Roulx that consists of various charters and documents of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem which are numbered and organized chronologically from 1100 to 1310.\n Les Hospitaliers en Terre sainte et à Chypre (1100–1319) (1904).\n Les Hospitaliers à Rhodes jusqu'à la mort de Philibert de Naillac (1310-1421) (1913).\n\nDana Carleton Munro. Dana Carleton Munro (1866–1933), an American historian.\n\n The Fourth Crusade (1896). In Volume 3.I of Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of History.\n A Syllabus of Medieval History, 395-1300 (1899). Includes chapters of chivalry, the Byzantine empire, the Saracen empires, and the Crusades. Extended to 1500 by American medieval historian Joseph R. Strayer (1904–1987), published in 1942.\n Letters of the Crusaders (1902). Correspondence regarding the First through Sixth Crusades, and others through 1281. Published as a stand-alone document as well as Volume 1.IV of Translations and Reprints.\n Essays on the Crusades (1902). With works by Munro, Hans Prutz (1843–1929) and Charles Diehl (1859–1944).\n Urban and the Crusaders (1902). Collection of sources including Urban II at the Council of Clermont (also published separately), the Truce of God, privileges granted to the Crusaders, Peter the Hermit, and selected bibliography. Volume 1.II of Translations and Reprints.\n Christian and Infidel in the Holy Land (1902). In Essays on the Crusades.\n A History of the Middle Ages (1902). A textbook on the history of the Western world from Charlemagne until the fourteenth century, including the Byzantine empire, the Muslim world from 750 to 1095, and the Crusades from 1096 to 1204.\n Medieval Civilization: Selected Studies from European Authors (1904). with American historian George Sellery (1872–1962). Includes articles on: Chivalry (Jacques Flach); Character and results of the Crusades (Charles Seignobos); ibn Jubayr's al-Rihlah; and Material for Literature from the Crusades (Vincent Vaublanc).\nDid the Emperor Alexios I ask for aid at the Council of Piacenza, 1095? (1922) An article in the American Historical Review.\n The Kingdom of the Crusaders (1935). Based on Munro's lectures of 1924. A history from before the First Crusade until the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1189. With an extensive bibliography.\n\nGirolamo Golubovich. Girolamo Golubovich (1865–1941), an Italian historian.\n\n Serie cronologica dei reverendissimi superiori di Terra Santa (1898). A chronological series on the Grand Masters of the Knights Templar.\n (1900). The travel account of Italian friar Francesco Suriano (1480-1481). Edited by G. Golubovich.\n Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell'Oriente francescano, 14 volumes (1906–1927).\n Collectanea Terrae Sanctae ex archivo Hierosolymitano deprompta (1933). Edited by G. Golubovich.\n\nWilliam Miller. William Miller (1864–1945), a British-born medievalist and journalist, specializing in the period of Frankish rule in Greece following the sack of Constantinople in 1204.\n\n Travels and Politics in the Near East (1898).\n The Latins in the Levant: History of Frankish Greece (1204–1566) (1908).\n Essays on the Latin Orient (1921). A comprehensive history of Greece, from Roman times, through the Byzantine empire, rule by the Franks, Venetians and Genoese, Turkish Greece (1460–1684), and the Venetian revival (1684–1718). Includes brief sections on the Balkans, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and a biography of Anna Komnene, called a Byzantine Blue Stocking.\n Empire of Trebizond, the Last Greek Empire (1926). A history of the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), a successor state to the Eastern Roman Empire.\n\nFerdinand Chalandon. Ferdinand Chalandon (1875–1921), a French medievalist and Byzantinist.\n\n Essai sur le règne d'Alexis Ier Comnène (1081-1118) (1900). An account of the rule of Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (c. 1048 – 1118).\n Histoire de la domination normande en Italie et en Sicile, 2 volumes (1907).\n Jean II Comnène, 1118-1143, et Manuel I Comnène, 1143-1180 (1912).\n Histoire de la Première Croisade jusqu'à l'élection de Godefroi de Bouillon (1925). A history of the First Crusade from the Council of Clermont until the election of Godfrey of Bouillon as Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem.\n Sigillographie de l'Orient latin (1943). Continuation of the work of French historian and numismatist Gustave Schlumberger (1844–1929).\nHenry Gough. Henry Gough (1821–1906), a British barrister of the Middle Temple.\n\n Itinerary of King Edward the First throughout his reign, A. D. 1272-1307 (1900). A biography extracted from the public record that includes a history of Lord Edward's Crusade.\n\nMarius André. Marius André (1868–1927), a French historian. (cf. French Wikipedia, Marius André)\n\n Le Bienheureux Raymond Lulle (1232-1315) (1900). A biography of Spanish missionary blessed Ramon Lull (1232/1236 – 1315).\n\nÉmile Bridrey. Émile Bridrey (1873-1943), a French historian.\n\n La Condition Juridique des Croisés et le Privilège de Croix (1900). The legal condition of the Crusaders and the Privilege of the Cross. A study of the history of French law.\n\nJean-Baptiste Martin. Abbé Jean-Baptiste Martin (1864–1922), a French historian of the Catholic Church. (cf. French Wikipedia, Jean-Baptiste Martin)\n\n Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 53 volumes (1901–1927). First published in 31 volumes (1759-1798) by Giovanni D. Mansi (1692 –1769). Continued by J-B. Martin and Louis Petit (1868–1927). Extensive edition of Church councils from the First Council of Nicaea in 325 through the Council of Florence in 1438. Includes the Canons of the Council of Clermont. and other source material relevant to the Crusades.\n\nArturo Magnocavallo. Arturo Magnocavallo (fl. 1901), an Italian historian.\n\n Marin Sanudo il Vecchio e il suo progetto di crociata (1901). An account of Marin Sanuto the Elder and his crusade project.\n\nCharles Bémont. Charles Bémont (1848–1939), a French scholar.\n\n History of Europe from 395 to 1270 (1902). A textbook originally written in French in collaboration with French historian Gabriel Monod (1844–1912). Introduction by American medievalist George Burton Adams (1851–1925). Translated into English by Mary Sloan. Includes chapters on the Christian and Muslim (Mussulman) Orient from the seventh to eleventh centuries, and on the First through Eighth Crusades.\n Histoire de l'Europe au moyen âge, 1270–1493 (1931). History of Europe in the Middle Ages from 1270 to 1493.\n\nEarly Twentieth Century Fiction. The Crusades continued to be a popular subject in twentieth-century fiction, including the following.\n\n G. A. Henty (1832–1902), an English novelist who wrote Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades (1882), American title, The Boy Knight (1891); For the Temple: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1888); and A Knight of the White Cross: A Tale of the Siege of Rhodes (1896).\n The Assassins: a Romance of the Crusades (1902), by British writer Nevill Myers Meakin (1876–1912). A fictionalized account of the attempt of master Assassin Rashid ad-Din Sinan (after 1132 – 1193) to murder Saladin in 1176.\n Richard the Fearless: A Tale of the Red Crusade (1904), by Paul Creswick.\n The Brethren (1904), by H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925). A novel set during the Third Crusade that features Saladin and the Assassins.\n Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1927–1928), in which Lord Greystoke encounters the descendants of a Crusader contingent of knights of Richard I of England. By author Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950).\n The Lord of Samarcand (originally published in the 1920s and 1930s), short stories about Crusader knights, by author American author Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), famous for his novels about Conan the Barbarian.\n Crusades Trilogy (1998–2000), a trio of novels entitled The Road to Jerusalem, The Knight Templar, and The Kingdom at the End of the Road, by Swedish author Jan Guillou (born 1944).\n\nEdgar Blochet. Edgar Blochet (1870-1937), a French historian.\n\n Les relations diplomatiques des Hohenstaufen avec les Sultans d'Egypte (1902), in Revue historique 80, 1902.\n Introduction à l'Histoire des Mongols de Fadl Allah Rashid ed-Din (1910). An introduction to the work Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh by Persian historian Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadān (1247–1318).\n\nKarl Zimmert. Karl Zimmert (fl. 1903), a German historian.\n\n Der Friede zu Adrianapol, in Byzantinische Zeitschrift (1902).\n Der deutsch-byzantinische Konflikt vom Juli 1189 bis Februar 1190, in Byzantinische Zeitschrift (1903).\n\nLucien Paulot. Lucien Paulot (1864-1938), a French historian.\n\n Un Pape français: Urbain II (1903). With a preface by French historian Georges Goyau (1869–1939).\n\nCharles Seignobos. Charles Seignobos (1854–1942), a French historian and historiographer. Considered as one of the leading proponents of the historical method along with French historian Charles-Victor Langlois (1863–1929). Seignobos' view of the Crusades is best summarized in a quote: \"In the eleventh century ... the barbarous Christians penetrated the lands of the civilized Muslims\".\n\n Character and Results of the Crusades (1904). An essay in Dana C. Munro's Medieval Civilization: Selected Studies from European Authors.\n History of Mediæval Civilization (1909). Translated by American historian James Alton James (1864–1962). The Crusades though the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin are briefly covered in Chapter VIII, Oriental Civilization in the West.\n\nAchille Luchaire. Denis Jean Achille Luchaire (1846–1908), a French historian.\n\n Innocent III, 6 volumes (1904–1908). The six volumes are: Rome et Italie; La Croisade des Albigeois; La Papauté et l'Empire; La Question d'Orient; Les Royautés vassales du Saint-Siège; and Le Concile de Latran et la réforme de l'Église.\n\nJules Gay. Jules Gay (1867-1935), a French historian specializing in the medieval popes.\n\n Le Pape Clément VI et les affaires d'Orient (1342-1352) (1904).\n\nErnst Gerland. Ernst Gerland (1870–1934), a German historian.\n\n Geschichte des lateinischen Kaiserreiches von Konstantinopel (1905).\n\nGiuseppe Gerola. Giuseppe Gerola (1877–1938), an Italian historian known for his involvement in monument restoration projects and his studies on the Kingdom of Candia (Venetian Crete).\n\n Monumenti veneti nell'isola di Creta, 4 volumes (1905).\n\nWilliam Barron Stevenson. William Barron Stevenson (1869-1954), a British historian.\n\n The Crusaders in the East: A brief history of the wars of Islam with the Latins in Syria during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (1907). A history of the Crusades from the Muslim viewpoint, with sources drawn from Islamic histories. Includes major chapters on Zengi, Nur ad-Din and Saladin. Extensive bibliography and chronology discussion.\n\nJames Rennell Rodd. James Rennell Rodd, 1st Baron Rennell (1858–1941), a British historian, poet and politician, serving as British Ambassador to Italy during the First World War.\n\n The Princes of Achaia and the Chronicles of Morea: A study of Greece in the Middle Ages (1906).\nOliver J. Thatcher. Oliver Joseph Thatcher (1857–1937), an American historian.\n\n A source book for mediæval history: selected documents illustrating the history of Europe in the Middle Age (1905). With Edgar H. McNeal.\n Library of original sources (1907). Volume IV discusses the Crusades.\n\nEdgar H. McNeal. Edgar Holmes McNeal (1874–1955), an American medieval historian.\n\n A source book for mediæval history: selected documents illustrating the history of Europe in the Middle Age (1905). With Oliver J. Thatcher.\n The conquest of Constantinople (1936). Translated from the old French work La Conquête de Constantinople of Robert de Clari (died after 1216).\n\nMaurice Prou. Maurice Prou (1861–1930), a French archivist, paleographer and numismatist.\n\n Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier, roi de France (1059-1108) (1908). With Auguste H. Longnon (1844–1911).\nAlan Orr Anderson. Alan Orr Anderson (1879–1958), a Scottish historian and compiler.\n\n Scottish annals from English Chroniclers A.D. 500 to 1286 (1908).\n Early Sources of Scottish History, A.D. 500 to 1286, 2 volumes (1922).\n\nAugust C. Krey. August Charles Krey (1887–1961), an American medievalist.\n\n John of Salisbury's Knowledge of the Classics (1909). Classical interests of John of Salisbury (1115/1120–1180), bishop of Chartres, author of Historia Pontificalis quae Supersunt, a description of Western Europe during and after the Second Crusade. John reputedly lost an arm trying to protect Thomas Becket from a fatal blow.\n The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants (1921).\nA history of deeds done beyond the sea (1943). A translation of William of Tyre's work, with Emily Atwater Babcock.\nUrban's Crusade: Success or Failure (1948). In American Historical Review, LIII (1948), pp. 235–250.\nReview of Crusading Warfare (1097-1193), by R. C. Smail. The American Historical Review, 62(2), 378–379.\n\nT. E. Lawrence. Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence (1888–1935), a British officer, archaeologist and author, famously known as Lawrence of Arabia. Member of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Lawrence was a British representative at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919–1920.\n\n The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture—to the End of the 12th Century (1910). Lawrence's thesis at Oxford. Eventually published as Crusader Castles, 2 volumes, in 1936.\n Introduction to Travels in Arabia Deserta (1921), by English explorer Charles M. Doughty (1843–1926)\n Anonymous articles for the Times of London, supporting the Arab cause after World War I.\n Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922, published 1926). An autobiographical account of Lawrence's activities during the war. Made into the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.\n\nHenri Dehérain. Henri Dehérain (1867–1941), a French historian and geographer.\n\n Les origines du recueil des \"historiens des croisades\" (1919). A study of the origins of Recueil des historiens descroisades.\n Le consul orientaliste Joseph Rousseau (1936). An account of the work of French orientalist Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1780-1831).\n Silvestre de Sacy et l'enseignement de l'arabe à Marseille (1937).\nCharles Wendell David. Charles Wendell David (1885–1984), an American medievalist.\n\n Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (1920). A biography of Robert Curthose, the eldest son of William the Conqueror.\n\nWinston Churchill. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965), a British statesman, army officer, and writer.\n\n A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 volumes (1956–1958). A history of Great Britain and America from 55 BC through 1902. The first volume, The Birth of Britain, includes a chapter on Richard I of England and the Third Crusade.\nKate Norgate. Kate Norgate (1853–1935), a British historian and one of the first women to achieve comparable academic success. She is best known for her history of England under the Angevin kings and for coining the name Angevin Empire to describe their domains.\n\n Richard the Lion Heart (1924). A biography of Richard I of England.\n\nRené Grousset. René Grousset (1885–1952), a French historian.\n\n The Epic of the Crusades (1926). Translation of L'épopée des Croisades by Noël Lindsay (1970). Two centuries of history of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem and nine Crusades which marked two extraordinary centuries, from 1095 to 1291, in the history of the Christian West and of Islam.\n Histoire des croisades et du royaume franc de Jérusalem, 3 volumes (1934-1936). The translation of Histoire, The History of the Crusades, was a standard reference of the subject. (cf. French Wikipedia, Histoire des croisades et du royaume franc de Jérusalem)\n L'empire mongol (1941). A history of the Mongol empire.\n L'empire du Levant: histoire de la question d'Orient (1946). For René Grousset, the question of the Orient is the problem of relations between Europe and Asia. He first shows in this historical sketch what was the legacy of Antiquity and what, at the advent of the Christian empire, around 323, remained from the results of the Alexandrian conquest. The history of these east–west relations is then studied in its three successive aspects: Byzantine solution in the early Middle Ages, Frankish solution from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Turkish solution from 1360 and especially from 1453.\n Histoire de l'Arménie des origines à 1071 (1947).\n\nH. A. R. Gibb. H. A. R. Gibb (1895–1971), a Scottish historian on orientalism.\n\n Arabic Literature – An Introduction (1926).\n Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354 (1929). Translation of Rihla (Voyages), the travelogue of Moroccan scholar and explorer Ibn Battūta (1304–1369). Translated by Charles Defrémery (1822–1883), B. R. Sanguinetti (1811–1883) and H. A. R. Gibb (1895–1971).\n The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932). Extracted and translated from the Dhayl tārīkh Dimashq (Chronicle of Damascus from 1097 to 1159) of Arab historian ibn al-Qalānisi (c. 1071 – 1160).\n Modern Trends in Islam (1947). French edition Les tendances modernes de l'Islam translated by Bernard Vernier.\n Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (1949).\n\nAnton Chroust. Anton Chroust (1864–1945), a German historian. (cf. German Wikipedia, Anton Chroust)\n\n Quellen zur Geschichte des Kreuzzüges Kaiser Friedrichs I, 1 volume (1928). Sources on the history of Frederick I on the Third Crusade. Includes Historia de expeditione Friderici imperatoris, Historia Peregrinorum and Epistola de Morte Friderici Imperatoris.\n\nJohn L. La Monte. John L. La Monte (1902–1949), an American historian.\n\n Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100–1291 (1932).\n The Wars of Frederick II against the Ibelins in Syria and Cyprus by Philip de Novare (1936).\n A syllabus and reading list to accompany Carl Stephenson's Mediæval History (1936). Companion to Mediæval History: Europe from the Fourth to the Sixteenth Century (1935) by American historian Carl Stephenson (1886–1954).\n The Noble Houses of Outremer (1937). Genealogical and biographical studies of the Crusading States.\n Some Problems in Crusading Historiography (1940). In Speculum, Volume 15.\n\nPaul Deschamps. Paul Deschamps (1888-1974), a French medieval historian. (cf. French Wikipedia, Paul Deschamps)\n\n Les Châteaux des Croisés en Terre Sainte (1934-1939).\n Terre Sainte Romane (1964).\n\nCarl Erdmann. Carl Erdmann (1898–1945), a German historian specializing in medieval political and intellectual history.\n\n Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (1935).\n The Origin of the Idea of Crusade (1977). Translation of Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens by Marshall W. Baldwin (1903–1975) and Walter Goffart (born 1934). Forward and introductory notes by Baldwin.\n\nJoseph Reese Strayer. Joseph Reese Strayer (1904–1987), an American medievalist historian.\n\n A Syllabus of Medieval History, 395-1500 (1942). Includes chapters of chivalry, the Byzantine empire, the Saracen empires, and the Crusades. Extension of A Syllabus of Medieval History, 395-1300 (1899) by American historian Dana C. Munro (1866–1933).\n The Albigensian Crusade (1972). An account of the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–1229, with an epilog by Carol Lansing.\n\nComprehensive studies \nIn the later half of the 20th century, a number of key, comprehensive studies of the Crusades were published. These works provide the basis of Crusader studies and were authored by many of the more prominent historians discussed here.\n\nRunciman's History of the Crusades. A History of the Crusades is the first modern, comprehensive review of the Crusades published after 1950. It was written by Sir James Cochran Stevenson (Steven) Runciman (1903–2000), a British historian of the Middle Ages, specializing in the Crusades and the Byzantine empire. (cf. French Wikipedia, Steven Runciman). The work consists of three volumes covering the history of the Holy Land, including pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the rise of the Islamic caliphates and sultanates. The Crusades are covered from the First Crusade until 1464.\n\n A History of the Crusades, Volume One: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951).\n A History of the Crusades, Volume Two: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187 (1952).\n A History of the Crusades, Volume Three: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954).\n\nWisconsin Collaborative History. The Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, 6 volumes (1969–1989). Under the general editorship of Kenneth M. Setton.\n\n Volume I. The First One Hundred Years (1969). Edited by Marshall W. Baldwin. Western Europe, Byzantium, the Assassins and the Holy Land before the Crusades. The First Crusade, the Crusade of 1101, the kingdom of Jerusalem from 1101 to 1146, with the loss of Edessa. The Second Crusade and afterward. The rise of Saladin and the loss of Jerusalem.\n Volume II. The Later Crusades, 1189–1311 (1969). Edited by Robert L. Wolff and Harry W. Hazard. The Norman kingdom of Sicily. The Third Crusade. The Fourth Crusade. The Latin Empire of Constantinople and the Frankish states in Greece. The Albigensian Crusade. The Children's Crusade. The Fifth Crusade. The Sixth Crusade. The Baron's Crusade. The Crusades of Louis IX. The Ayyubids. The Mongols. The Mamluks.\n Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteen Centuries (1975). Edited by Harry W. Hazard. Crusades in the fourteenth century. Byzantium and the Crusades. The Morea. The Catalans and Florentines in Greece. The Hospitallers at Rhodes. The kingdom of Cyprus. The Reconquista. The Mamluks. The Mongols. The German Crusade in the Baltics. The Crusade against the Hussites.\n Volume IV. The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States (1979). Edited by Harry W. Hazard. Life in Palestine and Syria. Pilgrimages and shrines. Ecclesiastical art. Military architecture. Arts in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Rhodes.\n Volume V. The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East (1985). Edited by Norman P. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard (1918-1989). Impact on Muslim lands. Social classes. Political and ecclesiastical organization of the Crusader States. Agriculture. Teutonic Knights. Venice and the Crusades. Missions to the East.\n Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe (1989). Edited by Norman P. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard (1918-1989). Legal and political theory. Crusader propaganda. Financing. Institutions of the kingdom of Cyprus. Social evolution in Latin Greece. The Ottoman Turks. The Crusade of Varna. Coinage.\n Select Bibliography on the Crusades. Compiled by Hans E. Mayer and Joyce McLellan. Edited by Harry W. Hazard.\n\nThe Crusades—An Encyclopedia. The Crusades—An Encyclopedia (2006). Edited by historian Alan V. Murray. A comprehensive treatment of the Crusades with over 1000 entries written by 120 authors from 25 countries. Highlights include entries by the following historians.\n\n American historian James M. Powell, Editorial Consultant on the work\n British academic Anna Sapir Abulafia who specializes in medieval Christian-Jewish relations.\n British medieval historian Malcolm Barber, a leading expert on the Knights Templar.\n Canadian historian Niall Christie, specializing on Islamic sources of the Crusades.\n British historian Susan B. Edgington, with works on original Western sources of the Crusades.\n Egyptian historian Taef El-Azhari, specializing in the history of the Seljuk and Zengid dynasties.\n Italian historian Laura Minervini, an expert on the Gestes des Chiprois.\n French historian Jean Richard, a medievalist.\n British historian Jonathan Phillips, author of numerous works on the First, Second and Fourth Crusades.\n British historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, a widely published expert on the Crusades; member of the Editorial Advisory Board.\n British historian J. Elizabeth Siberry, a scholar on Crusader literature.\n British historian Christopher J. Tyerman (born 1953), a prominent expert on the Crusades.\n\nThe Oxford History of the Crusades. The Oxford History of the Crusades (1995). Edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938–2016), a British historian of the Crusades. A series of essays on the Crusades by contemporary historians as follows.\n\n The Crusading Movement and Historians, by Jonathan Riley-Smith.\n Origins [of the Crusades], by British historian Marcus G. Bull.\n The Crusading Movement, 1096–1274, by British historian Simon Lloyd.\n The State of Mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300, by Jonathan Riley-Smith.\n Songs [of the Crusades], by Michael J. Routledge.\n The Latin East, 1098–1291, by British medievalist Jonathan P. Phillips.\n Art in the Latin East, 1098–1291, by American art historian Jaroslav T. Folda III (born 1940).\n Architecture in the Latin East, 1098–1571, by British archeologist Denys Pringle.\n The Military Orders, 1120–1312, by British historian Alan J. Forey.\n Islam and the Crusades, 1096–1699, by British historian Robert Irwin.\n The Crusading Movement, 1274–1700, by British historian Norman Housley.\n The Latin East, 1291–1669, by British historian Peter W. Edbury.\n The Military Orders, 1312–1798, by historian Anthony T. Luttrell.\n Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by British historian J. Elizabeth Siberry.\n Revival and Survival, by Jonathan Riley-Smith.\n Chronology and Maps.\n\nGod's War. God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2006) is a 21st-century comprehensive study of the Crusades by British Crusader historian Christopher Tyerman (born 1953)The dust jacket announces God's War as \"the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story\" and compares it to Runciman's \"well-loved and much-published classic study of the Crusades.\"\n\nHistorians after the mid-Twentieth century \nIndividual historians from the later 20th century through the current time include the following.\n\nAnna Sapir Abulafia. Anna Brechta Sapir Abulafia (born 1952), a British academic who specializes in religious history.\n\n Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (1995).\n Hebrew Sources (2006). In The Crusades—An Encyclopedia.\nEugene N. Anderson. Eugene Newton Anderson (1900-1984), an American historian.\n\n Medieval and historiographical essays: in honor of James Westfall Thompson (1938). Edited by E. Anderson and James L. Cate.\n History of Western Civilization (1957).\nArthur John Arberry. Arthur John Arberry (1905–1969), a British orientalist.\n\n A volume in the autograph of Yāqūt the geographer (1951). A brief description of the work of Arab scholar Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229), with a reproduction of the manuscript of the Tamām Fasīh al-kalām of Ahmad ibn Fāris.\n\nThomas S. Asbridge. Thomas S. Asbridge, a British medieval historian.\n\n The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1130 (2000)\n The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam (2005).\n The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (2010).\n Works from the HathiTrust bibliographic catalogs\n Historians of the Crusades (2007–2008), an on-line database of scholars working in the field of Crusader studies. This is part of the Resources for Studying the Crusades created at Queen Mary University of London in 2007–2008.\n\nAziz Suryal Atiya. Aziz Suryal Atiya (1898–1988), an Egyptian Coptologist and historian specializing in Islamic and Crusades studies.\n\n The Crusade of Nicopolis (1934). An account of the battle of Nicopolis in 1396.\n The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (1938). Includes five appendixes: Petitio pro recuperatione Terrae Sanctae; Pilgrims and travelers; Aragon and Egypt; Lists of the crusaders; and Chronological tables.\nReview of A History of the Crusades, by S. Runciman (1952). Speculum, 27(3), 422–425.\n The Crusade (1962).\n The Crusade: Historiography and Bibliography (1962).\n Kitāb al-Ilmām, 7 volumes (1968–1976). A history of Alexandria by al-Nuwayrī (fl. 1365–1373) edited by Atiya and Swiss Egyptologist Étienne Combe (1881–1962).\nThe Crusade in the Fourteenth Century (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\nThe Aftermath of the Crusades (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n The Coptic Encyclopedia, 8 volumes (1991). Editor-in-chief.\n\nMarshall W. Baldwin. Marshall Whithed Baldwin (1903–1975), an American historian who was Professor Emeritus of History at New York University until his death.\n\n Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, 6 volumes (1969-1989), under the general editorship of Kenneth M. Setton (1914–1995). Volume I. The First One Hundred Years (1969). Edited by M. Baldwin: Western Europe, Byzantium, the Assassins and the Holy Land before the Crusades. The First Crusade, the Crusade of 1101, the kingdom of Jerusalem from 1101 to 1146, with the loss of Edessa. The Second Crusade and afterward. The rise of Saladin and the loss of Jerusalem.\nThe Latin States under Baldwin III and Amalric I, 1143–1174. (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe Decline and Fall of Jerusalem, 1174–1189 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n The Origin of the Idea of Crusade (1977), by Carl Erdmann (1898–1945). Translation by M. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (born 1934).\nMissions to the East in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\n\nMalcolm Barber. Malcolm Barber (born 1943), a British medieval historian and leading expert on the Knights Templar.\n\n The Trial of the Templars (1978).\n The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (1994).\nThe Military Orders, Volume I: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick (1994). Edited by M. Barber.\n Petrus Vallium Sarnaii (2016). In the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle.\n Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th–13th Centuries (2016). With Keith Bate.\nRichard Barber. Richard William Barber (born 1941), a British historian specializing in medieval history and literature.\n\n The Knight and Chivalry (1971)\n Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (1989). With English historian Juliet Barker.\n The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (2004)\n The Reign of Chivalry (2005).\n\nErnest Barker. Ernest Barker (1874–1960), an English political scientist.\n\n Crusades (1911), in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. A summary of the history of the Crusades, with sections on the Meaning of the Crusades, Historical Causes of the Crusades, and Literature of Crusades.\n The Crusades (1923). A later edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica article, edited with additional notes.\n List of Contributions of Barker to the Encyclopædia Britannica 11th Edition.\n Bibliography of works by Barker (1906–1956).\nVirginia G. Berry. Virginia G. Berry, a Canadian historian.\n\n The Journey of Louis VII to the East (1948). The English translation of De profectione Ludovico VII in Orientem, an edition of the eyewitness account of the ill-fated Second Crusade by Odo of Deuil, chaplain to the French king, Louis VII, contains many details, including views of contesting factions, decisive facts about the battles, and accounts of Greek customs and Turkish modes of combat.\n Peter the Venerable and the Crusades (1956). A biography of Peter the Venerable (c. 1092 – 1156).\n The Second Crusade (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n\nCharles Julian Bishko. Charles Julian Bishko, an American historian specializing on medieval Spain.\n\n The Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095-1492 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nSheila Blair. Sheila Blair (born 1948), an American scholar of Islamic art.\n\n A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din's Illustrated History of the World (1995). An illustrated (59 folios) edition of Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) by Persian historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani (1247–1318). The commentary traces the compendium's history from the scriptorium in Tabriz, through Herat during the Timurid dynasty, through the 19th-century Mughal court and the East India Company, to its final acquisition by the Royal Asiatic Society. Includes a translation by Wheeler Thackson of the articles of endowment of the Rabi’ Rashid. Volume XXVII of the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art.\n Arab Inscriptions in Persia (1998). In Encyclopædia Iranica's article on Epigraphy.\n Būyid Art and Architecture (2009).\n\nT. S. R. Boase. Thomas Sherrer Ross (T. S. R.) Boase (1898–1974), a British art historian.\n\n Boniface VIII (1933). A biography of pope Boniface VIII.\n Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography (1937). In History, Volume 22.\n The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia (1978).\nEcclesiastical Art in the Crusader States in Palestine and Syria (1979). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume IV. The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States.\nMilitary Architecture in the Crusader States in Palestine and Syria (1979). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume IV. The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States.\n\nClifford Edmund (C. E.) Bosworth. Clifford Edmund Bosworth (1928–2015), an English historian and orientalist, specializing in Arabic and Iranian studies.\n\n The Early Ghaznavids (1975). Chapter 5 of The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4.\n The Ghaznavids, their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994–1040 (1963). The first part of a history of the Ghaznavid empire.\n The Later Ghaznavids, Splendour and Decay: the dynasty in Afghanistan and northern India 1040–1186. (1977). The second part of the history of the Ghaznavids.\n The New Islamic Dynasties. A chronological and genealogical manual (1996).\n\nLouis R. Bréhier. Louis R. Bréhier (1869–1951), a French historian specializing in Byzantine studies.\n\n Crusades (1908). In the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), edited by Charles G. Herbermann (1840–1916). An overview of the history of the Crusades, numbered as eight. Topics include: I. Origin of the Crusades; II. Foundation of Christian states in the East; III. First destruction of the Christian states (1144-1187); IV. Attempts to restore the Christian states and the Crusade against Saint-Jean d'Acre (1192-1198); V. The Crusade against Constantinople (1204); VI. The thirteenth-century Crusades (1217-1252); VII. Final loss of the Christian colonies of the East (1254-1291); VIII. The fourteenth-century Crusade and the Ottoman invasion; IX. The Crusade in the fifteenth century; X. Modifications and survival of the idea of the Crusade.\n Crusades (Bibliography and Sources) (1908). In the Catholic Encyclopedia. A concise summary of the historiography of the Crusades.\n L'Église et l'Orient au Moyen Âge: Les Croisades (1907). The Church and the East in the Middle Ages: The Crusades, including an extensive bibliography. Covers the Holy Land from before the Crusades, including the role of Holy relics, Charlemagne's role in the Middle East, and the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1109; the Crusades through 1291; and later activities through 1453.\n Crusade of the Pastoureaux (1911). An account of the First Shepherds’ Crusade (1251). In the Catholic Encyclopedia.\n Histoire anonyme de la première croisade (1924). A translation of the anonymous account of the First Crusade, Gesta Francorum (Deeds of the Franks).\n List of Contributions of Bréhier to the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908–1913).\n Bibliography of works by Bréhier (1899–1950).\n Works of Bréhier from the HathiTrust bibliographic catalog (1899–1950).\n\nJames A. Brundage. James Arthur Brundage, an American historian specializing in the Crusades.\n\n The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (1962). Translations (various translators) from original documentary accounts of the times woven together with narrative introductions.\n The Crusades, Motives and Achievements (1964).\n Recent Crusade Historiography: Some Observations and Suggestions (1964). In Catholic Historical Review (CHR) 49.\n\nMarcus G. Bull. Marcus Graham Bull, a British historian.\n\n Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade (1993).\n Origins [of the Crusades] (1995). In The Oxford History of the Crusades, edited by J. Riley-Smith.\n\nClaude Cahen. Claude Cahen (1909–1991), a French orientalist and historian, specializing in the studies of the Islamic Middle Ages and Crusades sources.\n\n La Syrie du nord à l'époque des croisades et la principauté franque d'Antioche (1940).\n Historiography of the Seljuqid period (1962).\nThe Turkish Invasion: The Selchuükids (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe Turks in Iran and Anatolia before the Mongol Invasions (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe Mongols and the Near East (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n Tribes, Cities and Social Organizations (1975). Chapter 8 of The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4.\n The Formation of Turkey: the Seljukid Sultanate of Rūm: eleventh to fourteenth century (2001). With Peter M Holt.\nJames Lea Cate. James Lea Cate (1899-1981), an American historian and part of the Air Force Historical Division during World War II.\n\n Medieval and historiographical essays: in honor of James Westfall Thompson (1938). Edited by J. Cate and Eugene N. Anderson.\n The Crusade of 1101 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nFred A. Cazel. Fred A. Cazel (1921–2011), an American historian.\n\n Financing the Crusades (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n\nPeter Charanis. Peter Charanis (1908–1985), a Greek-born American scholar of Byzantium.\n\n The Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nMartin Chasin. Martin Chasin, an American historian.\n\n The Crusade of Varna (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n\nNiall Christie. Niall Christie, a Canadian historian of the Crusades.\n\n Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East, 1095–1382, from the Islamic Sources (2014)\n\nGiles Constable. Giles Constable (born 1929), a British historian and medievalist.\n\n Monks, Hermits and Crusaders in Medieval Europe (1978).\n Cluny from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries, Further studies (2000).\n The Historiography of the Crusades (2001), In The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World.\n\nEugene L. Cox. Eugene L. Cox, an American historian.\n\n The Green Count of Savoy (1967). A biography of Amadeus VI of Savoy.\n\nFarhad Daftary. Farhad Daftary (born 1938), an American historian specializing on medieval Persian history and the Isma'ili branch of Shia Islam.\n\n The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (1992).\n Encyclopædia Iranica (2008). Edited by F. Daftary.\nNorman Daniel. Norman Daniel (c. 1919 – 1992), a British historian.\n\n The Critical Approach to Arab Society in the Middle Ages (1981).\n The Legal and Political Theory of the Crusade (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n Crusader Propaganda (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n\nFrederic Duncalf. Frederic Duncalf (1882–1963), an American historian of the First Crusade.\n\n A problem in the use of parallel source material in medieval history: the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 (1912).\nThe Peasants Crusade (1921). An account of the People's Crusade.\n The Councils of Piacenza and Clermont (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n The First Crusade: Clermont to Constantinople (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n\nPeter W. Edbury. Peter W. Edbury (born 1947), A British historian.\n\n The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374 (1991).\n The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade (1996). A complete collection of the key texts describing Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem in October 1187 and the Third Crusade. Includes a translation of the Old French Continuation of William Tyre for the years 1184–1197.\n\nSusan B. Edgington. Susan B. Edgington, a British historian.\n\n Gendering the Crusades (2001).\n The First Crusade: the Capture of Jerusalem in AD 1099 (2003).\n Western Sources (2006). With Alan V. Murray. In The Crusades—An Encyclopedia.\n Jerusalem the Golden: the Origins and Impact of the First Crusade (2014).\n Crusading Chronicles (2016). In the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle.\nBaldwin I of Jerusalem, 1100–1118 (2019).\n\nCarl Erdmann. Carl Erdmann (1898–1945), a German historian specializing in medieval political and intellectual history.\n\n Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (1935).\n The Origin of the Idea of Crusade (1977). Translation of Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens by Marshall W. Baldwin (1903–1975) and Walter Goffart (born 1934). Forward and introductory notes by Baldwin.\nAustin P. Evans. Austin Patterson Evans, an American medieval historian.\n\n Bibliography of English translations from Medieval Sources (1946). By Austin P. Evans and Clarissa Palmer Farrar (1899–1963).\n Heresies of the high Middle Ages (1969). With Walter Leggett Wakefield.\n The Albigensian Crusade (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nNabīh Amīn Fāris. Nabīh Amīn Fāris (1906–1968), an Arab historian.\n\n Descriptive catalog of the Garrett collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Princeton University library (1938). With Philip Khuri Hitti.\n The Book of Idols (1952). A translation from the Arabic of the work of Hisham Ibn al-Kalbī by Nabih Amin Faris.\n Arab Culture in the Twelfth Century (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\n\nHarold S. Fink. Harold S. Fink (1903–1981), an American historian.\n\n A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095-1127 (1969). A translation of Gesta Francorum Iherusalem Perefrinantium (Historia Hierosolymitana) by Fulcher of Chartres (c. 1059 – after 1128).\n The Foundation of the Latin States, 1099–1118 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n\nAlan John Forey. Alan John Forey (born 1933), a British historian and an authority on the history of the military orders of the Middle Ages.\n\n The Military Orders from the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries (1992)\n The Military Orders, 1120–1312 (1995). In the Oxford History of the Crusades.\nAlfred Foulet. Alfred Foulet (1900–1987), a French historian.\n\n Lettres françaises du XIIIe siècle (1924). An edition of the work of Jean Pierre Sarrasin (died 1275) concerning letters from the Seventh Crusade.\n Le Couronnement de Renard, poème du treizième siècle (1929). An edition of the cycle of Reynard the Fox.\n The Epic Cycle of the Crusades (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n\nElizabeth Chapin Furber. Elizabeth Chapin Furber, an American historian.\n\n The Kingdom of Cyprus, 1191–1291 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n\nRichard N. Frye. Richard Nelson Frye (1920–2014), an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian studies.\n\n The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuks (1975).\n\nFrancesco Gabrieli. Francesco Gabrieli (1904–1996), an Italian Arabist and orientalist.\n\n Arabic Historiography of the Crusades (1962)\n Arab Historians of the Crusades (1969).\n\nDeno Geanakoplos. Deno John Geanakoplos (1916–2007), an American scholar of Byzantine cultural and religious history and Italian Renaissance intellectual history.\n\n Greek scholars in Venice: studies in the dissemination of Greek learning from Byzantium to Western Europe (1962).\n Byzantium and the Crusades, 1261–1354 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n Byzantium and the Crusades, 1354–1453 (1975). Ibid.\nH. A. R. Gibb. H. A. R. Gibb (1895–1971), a Scottish historian on orientalism.\n\n Arabic Literature – An Introduction (1926).\n Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354 (1929). Translation of Rihla (Voyages), the travelogue of Moroccan scholar and explorer Ibn Battūta (1304–1369). Translated by Charles Defrémery (1822–1883), B. R. Sanguinetti (1811–1883) and H. A. R. Gibb (1895–1971).\n The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932). Extracted and translated from the Dhayl tārīkh Dimashq (Chronicle of Damascus from 1097 to 1159) of Arab historian ibn al-Qalānisi (c. 1071 – 1160).\n Modern Trends in Islam (1947). French edition Les tendances modernes de l'Islam translated by Bernard Vernier.\n Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (1949).\n Islamic Society and the West, with Harold Bowen, 2 volumes (1950, 1957)\n Encyclopaedia of Islam, 11 volumes (1954– ). Edited by a number of leading orientalists including H. A. R. Gibb.\n The Caliphate and the Arab States (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nZengi and the Fall of Edessa (1969). An account of Turkish atabeg Zengi (1085–1146), founder of the Zengid dynasty, and his successful siege of Edessa in 1144 that triggered the Second Crusade. In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe Aiyūbids (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe Career of Nūr-ad-Din (1969). An account of Nur ad-Din (1118–1174), the son of Zengi and successor to the Zengid dynasty. In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe Rise of Saladin, 1169–1189 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n Saladin–Studies in Islamic History (1974). Edited by H. A. R. Gibb and Yusuf Ibish.\nKeith R. Giles. Keith Richard Giles is a British historian of the Crusades.\n\n The Emperor Frederick II's Crusade, c. 1215 – c. 1231 (1987).\n\nJohn Gillingham. John Gillingham (born 1940), a British historian specializing in the Angevin Empire.\n\n Richard I (1999). A biography of Richard I of England.\n\nHarry W. Hazard. Harry W. Hazard (1918-1989), an American numismatist and historian of the Crusades.\n\n The Numismatic History of Late Medieval North Africa (1952). Prepared for the American Numismatic Society.\n Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, 6 volumes (1969-1989). Under the general editorship of Kenneth M. Setton. Volumes II–VI edited by H. Hazard.\nMuslin North Africa, 1049–1394 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n Select Bibliography on the Crusades (1989). Compiled by Hans E. Mayer and Joyce McLellan, and edited by H. W. Hazard.\nFrederick G. Heymann. Frederick Gotthold Heymann (1900–1983), a Canadian historian.\n\n The Crusades against the Hussites (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nCarole Hillenbrand. Carole Hillenbrand (born 1943), a British Islamic scholar.\n\n History of the Jazira, 1100–1150: The Contribution of ibn al-Azraq al-Fariq (1979). Translations of the two existing manuscripts of Ta'rikh Mayyafariqin wa-Amid (The history of Mayyafariqin and Amid) by historian ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriqī (1116–1176), with annotations and commentary. Ph.D thesis, University of Edinburgh.\n A Muslim Principality in Crusader Times: the Early Artuqid state (1990). Based on History of the Jazira, 1100–1150.\n The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (2000). Discusses themes that highlight how Muslims reacted to the presence of the Crusaders in the heart of traditionally Islamic territory. Examines ideological concerns and the importance of the jihad in the context of the gradual recovery of the Holy Land and the expulsion of the Crusaders.\nPhilip Khuri Hitti. Philip Khuri Hitti (1886–1978), a Lebanese-American authority on Arab and Middle Eastern history, Islam, and Semitic languages, helping to create the discipline of Arabic studies in the United States.\n\n The Origins of the Islamic State, 2 volumes (1916–1924). A translation from the Arabic accompanied with annotations, geographic and historic notes of the Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān (The Conquest of Nations), an early history of the Caliphate, of al-Imâm al-Balādhuri.\nAn Arab-Syrian Gentleman in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munqidh (1929). A translation of Kitab al-I'tibar, the autobiography of Arab historian Usama ibn-Munqidh (1095–1188).\n History of the Arabs (1937). A history covering the pre-Islamic period; the rise of Islam; the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates; Moslems in Europe; and the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties.\nDescriptive catalog of the Garrett collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Princeton University library (1938). With Nabīh Amīn Fāris.\n History of the Arabs: from the earliest times to the present (1943).\n The Impact of the Crusades on Moslem Lands (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\n\nNatasha Hodgson Natasha Hodgson, a British Historian specializing in the history of the Crusades.\n Women, crusading and the Holy Land in historical narrative (2007).\n Crusading and Masculinities (2019). Edited with Katherine J. Lewis and Matthew M. Mesley.\n Works by Natasha Hodgson\n\nUrban Tigner Holmes. Urban Tigner Holmes Jr. (1900–1972), an American scholar focusing on medieval literature and romance philology.\n\n A History of Old French Literature, from the Origins to 1300 (1937).\n A New Interpretation of Chrétien's Conte del Graal (1948). A controversial interpretation of Chrétien de Troyes' 12th century romance Perceval, the Story of the Grail. With Sister Amelia Klenke.\n Life among the Europeans in Palestine and Syrian in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (1979). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume IV. The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States.\nPeter Holt. Peter Malcolm Holt (1918– 2006), a historian of the Middle East.\n\n The Cambridge History of Islam (1992). Edited by P. Holt.\n The Crusaders States and their Neighbours, 1098-1291 (2004).\n\nNorman Housley. Norman Housley, a British historian specializing in the Crusades.\n\n The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (1992).\n The Crusading Movement, 1274–1700. (1995).\n The Italian Crusades: The Papal-Angevin Alliance and the Crusades Against Christian Lay Powers, 1254-1343 (1982).\n\nKathryn Hurlock. Kathryn Hurlock, a British historian specializing in the role of crusades in medieval British life and the impact of warfare.\n Wales and the Crusades, c.1095-1291 (2011)\n Britain, Ireland and the Crusades, c.1000-1300 (2013)\n Crusading and Pilgrimage in the Norman World (2018). Edited with Paul Oldfield.\n Works by Kathryn Hurlock\n\nJoan M. Hussey. Joan Mervyn Hussey (1907–2006), a British Byzantine scholar and historian.\n\n The Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century: some different interpretations (1950).\n The Byzantine World (1957).\n The Cambridge Medieval History. Volume IV, The Byzantine Empire (1966). Second edition, edited by J. Hussey.\n Byzantium and the Crusades, 1081–1204 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nHalil İnalcık. Halil İnalcık (1916–2016), a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire.\n\n The Ottoman Turks and the Crusades, 1329–1451 (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\nThe Ottoman Turks and the Crusades, 1451–1522 (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n\nDavid Jacoby. David Jacoby (1928-2018), an Israeli historian of medieval studies.\n\n Studies on the Crusader States and on Venetian Expansion (1989).\n Social Evolution in Latin Greece (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\n\nEdgar N. Johnson. Edgar Nathaniel Johnson (1901–1969), an American historian.\n\n An Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500 (1937). With James Westfall Thompson.\n The Crusades of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI (1969). An account of the actions of Frederick Barbarossa in the Third Crusade and the follow-on Crusade of 1197 conducted by his son Henry VI of Germany. In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe German Crusade on the Baltic (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nHoward Kaminsky. Howard Kaminsky (born 1924), a British historian.\n\n A History of the Hussite Revolution (1967). A history of the Hussites and their conflicts with the Catholic Church, particularly the Hussite Wars that include the anti-Hussite crusades.\nBenjamin Z. Kedar. Benjamin Zeev Kedar (born 1938) is an Israeli historian of the Crusades and the Latin East. (Benjamin Kedar CV)\n\n The Crusaders in their Kingdom, 1099–1291 (1987).\n The Franks in the Levant, 11th to 14th Centuries (1993)\n The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 (2004). In the Western Historiography of the Crusades (2004).\n\nHugh N. Kennedy. Hugh N. Kennedy (born 1947), a British medieval historian specializing in the early Islamic Middle East and the Crusades.\n\n The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 600–1050 (1986).\n Crusader Castles (1994). An account of the history and architecture of Crusader castles in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, County of Tripoli and Principality of Antioch between 1099 and 1291. \n The Historiography of Islamic Egypt, c. 950–1800 (2000).\nCastles: Outremer (2006). In The Crusades - An Encyclopedia.\nHilmar Carl Krueger. Hilmar Carl Krueger, an American historian specializing in medieval Italy.\n\n The Italian Cities and the Arabs before 1093 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n\nAngeliki E. Laiou. Angeliki E. Laiou (1941–2008), a Greek-American Byzantinist.\n\n The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (2001). Edited by A. Laiou and Roy Mottahedeh.\nAnn Lambton. Ann Katharine Swynford Lambton (1912–2008), a British historian and expert on medieval and early modern Persian history.\n\n Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia (1988).\n The Cambridge History of Islam (1992). Edited by A. Lambton.\n\nBernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), a British-American historian specialized in Oriental studies, particularly the Assassins.\n\n The Sources for the History of the Syrian Assassins, in Speculum, XXVII (1952).\n The Assassins: a Radical Sect in Islam (1967).\n The IIsmāʻīlites and the Assassins (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume 1.\n Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (1974).\n The Origins of Ismāʻīlism: A Study of the Historical Background of the Fātimid Caliphate (2001).\n\nSimon Lloyd. Simon Lloyd, a British historian.\n\n English Society and the Crusade, 1216-1307 (1988).\n The Crusading Movement, 1096–1274 (1995). In The Oxford History of the Crusades.\n\nPeter Lock. Peter Lock, a British historian.\n\n The Franks in the Aegean, 1204-1500 (1995).\n The Routledge Companion to the Crusades (2006). A comprehensive discussion of all the Crusades, major players and historians. With complete bibliography.\nChronicle of the Morea (2006). A discussion of the 14th century work Chronicle of the Morea. In The Crusades - An Encyclopedia.\nJean Longnon. Jean Longnon (1887–1979), a French bibliothécaire, historian and journalist. (cf. French Wikipedia, Jean Longnon)\n\n Livre de la conqueste de la princée de l'Amorée: Chronique de Morée (1204-1305) (1911). An edition of the Chronicle of the Morea, a 14th-century history covering the establishment of Crusader states in Greece, including a discussion of the civil organization of the Principality of Achaea.\n The Frankish States in Greece, 1204–1311 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n Les Compagnons de Villehardouin: Recherches sur les croisés de la quatrième croisade (1978). A study of Geoffrey de Villehardouin and the Fourth Crusade.\nHarry Luke. Sir Harry Charles Luke (1884–1969), an official in the British Colonial Office, serving in He served in Cyprus and Palestine among others, and was the author of books on several of these countries.\n\n The Handbook of Cyprus (1913).\n The Handbook of Palestine (1922).\n\n The Kingdom of Cyprus, 1291–1369 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nThe Kingdom of Cyprus, 1369–1489 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nAnthony T. Luttrell. Anthony Thorton Luttrell, a British historian specializing in the military orders.\n\n The Hospitallers at Rhodes, 1306–1421 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\nThe Military Orders, 1312–1798 (1995). In the Oxford History of the Crusades.\n Works by Anthony T. Luttrell.\n\nFrancis Lützow. Francis Lützow (1849–1916), a Bohemian historian.\n\n Lectures on the Historians of Bohemia (1905).\n The Life and Times of Master John Hus (1909). A biography of pre-Protestant Christian reformer Jan Hus, executed by the Catholic Church in 1415 for heresy, bringing about the Hussite Wars.\n The Hussite Wars (1914). An account of the Hussite Wars of the 15th century, in particular the Anti-Hussite Crusades.\n\nThomas F. Madden. Thomas F. Madden (born 1960), an American historian of the Crusades. (cf. Thomas Madden CV)\n\n The New Concise History of the Crusades (2005). (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; repr New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007).\n The Real History of the Crusades (2011). For the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (ARMA).\n\nArchibald Main. Archibald Main (1876–1947), a Scottish ecclesiastical historian.\n\n The Emperor Sigismund: the Stanhope essay (1903). A biography of 15th century Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund.\n\nHans E. Mayer. Hans Eberhard Mayer (born 1932), a German historian.\n\n Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (1960). A comprehensive bibliography of the Crusades.\nStudies in the History of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (1972).\nIbelin versus Ibelin: The Struggle for the Regency of Jerusalem 1253-1258 (1978).\nAmerica and the Crusades. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 125, No. 1 (1981)\nThe Succession to Baldwin II of Jerusalem: English Impact on the East (1985).\nAngevins versus Normans: The New Men of King Fulk of Jerusalem (1989).\nSelect Bibliography on the Crusades (1989). Compiled by H. Mayer and Joyce McLellan. Edited by Harry W. Hazard.\nEdgar H. McNeal. Edgar Holmes McNeal (1874-1955), an American historian specializing on medieval Europe and the Crusades.\n\n A Source Book for Mediæval History (1905). Selected documents illustrating the history of Europe in the Middle Age.\n The Conquest of Constantinople (1936).\n The Fourth Crusade (1977). With Robert L. Wolff. In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n\nDavid Michael Metcalf. David Michael Metcalf (1933–2018), a British numismatist.\n\n Coinage of the Crusades and the Latin East in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford (1995). A collection of Crusade-era coins at the Ashmolean Museum, Britain's first public museum. Published by the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Royal Numismatic Society.\n\nLaura Minervini. Laura Minervini, an Italian historian who is expert on the Gestes des Chiprois.\n\n Les Gestes des Chiprois et la tradition historiographique de l'Orient latin (2004).\n Literature of Outremer and Cyprus (2006). In The Crusades - An Encyclopedia.\n Gestes des Chiprois (2006). Ibid.\n Philip of Novara (2006). Ibid.\n\nJohn L. La Monte. John L. La Monte (1902–1949), an American historian.\n\n Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100–1291 (1932).\n The Wars of Frederick II against the Ibelins in Syria and Cyprus by Philip de Novare (1936).\n A syllabus and reading list to accompany Carl Stephenson's Mediæval History (1936). Companion to Mediæval History: Europe from the Fourth to the Sixteenth Century (1935) by American historian Carl Stephenson (1886–1954).\n Review of \"The Rule, Statutes and Customs of the Hospitallers 1099-1310,\" by E. J. King. Speculum, 10(3), 347–349.\n The Noble Houses of Outremer (1937). Genealogical and biographical studies of the Crusading States.\nJohn of Ibelin. The Old Lord of Beirut, 1177-1236 (1937).\n Some Problems in Crusading Historiography (1940). In Speculum, Volume 15 (1940), pp. 57–75.\n\nRoy Parviz Mottahedeh. Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, an American historian.\n\n The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (2001). Edited by R. Mottahedeh and Angeliki Laiou.\n\nAlan V. Murray. Alan V. Murray, a British historian specializing on the Crusades. (cf. Alan V. Murray CV)\n\n From Clermont to Jerusalem: The Crusades and Crusader Societies, 1095-1500 (1998). Edited by A. Murray.\n The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Dynastic History, 1099-1125 (2000).\n Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier, 1150-1500 (2001). Edited by A. Murray.\n The Crusades—An Encyclopedia (2006). Edited by A. Murray. A comprehensive treatment of the Crusades.\nSirarpie Der Nersessian. Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896–1989), an Armenian art historian specializing in Armenian and Byzantine studies.\n\n Armenia and the Byzantine Empire (1945).\n The Kingdom of Cilician Armenia (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n\nHelen J. Nicholson. Helen Jane Nicholson, a British historian of the Crusades and the Military Religious Orders.\n Chronicle of the Third Crusade: a translation of the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi (1997).\n The Crusades (2004).\n Palgrave Advances in the Crusades (2005). Edited by Helen J. Nicholson.\nItnerarium Peregrinarum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (2016). An account of the anonymous Itinerarium Regis Ricardi (Itnerarium Peregrinarum et Gesta Regis Ricardi) compiled by Richard de Templo and once attributed to medieval grammarian Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200). In Encyclopedia of Medieval Chronicle.\n Bibliography of works by Helen Nicholson.\n\nRobert L. Nicholson. Robert Lawrence Nicholson (1908-1985), an American historian of the Crusades.\n\n Tancred: a study of his career and work in their relation to the first Crusade and the establishment of the Latin states in Syria and Palestine (1940). A biography of Tancred, Prince of Galilee (1075–1112).\n Joscelyn I, Prince of Edessa (1954). A biography of Joscelyn I of Edessa.\n The Growth of the Latin States, 1118–1144 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\n Joscelyn III and the Fall of the Crusader States, 1134-1199 (1973). A biography of Joscelyn III, Count of Edessa.\n\nDavid C. Nicolle. David Charles Nicolle (born 1944) is a British historian specializing in the military history of the Middle East.\n\n Crusader Castles in the Holy Land, 1192–1302 (2004). Examines the early fortifications erected by the Crusaders in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.\nSidney Painter. Sidney Painter (1902–1960), an American medievalist and historian.\n\n Western Europe on the Eve of the Crusades (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe Third Crusade: Richard the Llionhearted and Philip Augustus (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe Crusade of Theobald of Champagne and Richard of Cornwall, 1239–1241 (1969). An account of the Barons' Crusade. In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n\nJonathan P. Phillips. Jonathan P. Phillips (born 1965), a British historian and medievalist.\n\n The Experience of Crusading (2003).\n The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (2004)\n The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (2010).\n The Crusades 1095-1197 (2014).\n Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (2018). An exploration of the ways in which the Crusades have been used in the last two centuries, including the varying uses of Crusading rhetoric and imagery.\n The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (2019).\n\nJames M. Powell. James M. Powell (1930–2011), an American historian.\n\n Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213-1221 (1986).\n The Crusades: An Introduction (2006). In The Crusades—An Encyclopedia, edited by Alan V. Murray.\n The Crusades, the Kingdom of Sicily, and the Mediterranean (2007).\n\nJoshua Prawer. Joshua Prawer (1917–1990), an Israeli historian.\n\n Histoire du royaume Latin de Jérusalem (1969).\n The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (1972).\n The World of the Crusaders (1972).\n Crusader Institutions (1980)\nSocial Classes in the Crusader States: the \"Minorities\" (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\nSocial Classes in the Latin Kingdom: the Franks (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\nThe History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1988)\n The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period (638-1099) (1996).\n\nJean Richard. Jean Barthélémy Richard (1921–2021), a French historian and medievalist.\n\n The Political and Ecclesiastical Organization of the Crusader States (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\nAgricultural Conditions in the Crusader States (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\nThe Institutions of the Kingdom of Cyprus (1989). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.\nThe Crusades: c. 1071 - c. 1291 (1999).\n\nJonathan Riley-Smith. Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938–2016), a British historian of the Crusades. (cf. Jonathan Riley-Smith CV)\n\n The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1993).\n The Oxford History of the Crusades (1995). Edited by J. Riley-Smith.\n The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (1997)\n The works of Jonathan Riley-Smith in HathiTrust.\nLouise Buenger Robbert. Louise Buenger Robbert, an American historian and numismatist, with an emphasis on medieval Venice.\n\n The Venetian money market, 1150-1229 (1971).\n Reorganization of the Venetian coinage by Doge Enrico Dandolo (1974).\n Venice and the Crusades (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\nEttore Rossi. Ettore Rossi (1894-1955), an Italian historian.\n\n The Hospitallers at Rhodes, 1421–1523 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nJay Rubenstein. Jay Rubenstein (born 1967), an American historian of the Middle Ages.\n Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind (2002).\n What is the Gesta Francorum, and who was Peter Tudebode? (2005).\n\nSteven Runciman. Steven Runciman (1903–2000), a British historian of the Middle Ages, specializing in the Crusades and the Byzantine empire. (cf. French Wikipedia, Steven Runciman)\n\n The First Crusaders' Journey across the Balkan Peninsula (1949). In Byzantion, Volume XXIX, pp. 207–221.\nA History of the Crusades, Volume One: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951).\n A History of the Crusades, Volume Two: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187 (1952).\n A History of the Crusades, Volume Three: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954).\n The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (1958).\n Byzantine Civilisation (1959).\n The Families of Outremer: the Feudal Nobility of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099-1291 (1960).\nThe Pilgrimages to Palestine before 1093 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe First Crusade, Constantinople to Antioch (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe First Crusade, Antioch to Ascalon (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume I. The First One Hundred Years.\nThe Crusader States, 1243–1291 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nJosiah Cox Russell. Josiah Cox Russell, an American historian.\n\n The Population of the Crusader States (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\n\nHenry L. Savage. Henry Lyttleton Savage (1892–1979), an American Arthurian scholar.\n\n The Gawain-poet; studies in his personality and background (1956). A study of the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.\n Pilgrimages and Pilgrim Shrines in Palestine and Syria after 1095 (1979). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume IV. The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States.\n\nKenneth Meyer Setton. Kenneth Meyer Setton (1914–1995), an American historian and an expert on the history of medieval Europe and the Crusades.\n\n Catalan Domination of Athens, 1311–1388 (1948). A history of the founding of the Catalan Company and their subsequent control of the Duchy of Athens and Thebes.\n The Age of Chivalry (1969).\n Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, 6 volumes (1969-1989). General editorship.\n The Catalans in Greece, 1311–1380 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n The Catalans and Florentines in Greece, 1380–1462 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571, 4 volumes (1976).\n\nMoshe Sharon. Moshe Sharon (born 1937), an Israeli historian of Islam. Referred to as \"Israel's greatest Middle East scholar.\"\n\n Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, 6 volumes to date; 7th projected (1997–2021). An extensive work that provides the epigraphy of the Holy Land relating to construction, dedication, religious endowments, epitaphs, Quranic texts, prayers and invocations. His work has been instrumental in the continued analysis of original texts of the Crusades. Current volumes cover A through J, Part 1. Seventh volume partially covers Jerusalem.\n\nJ. Elizabeth Siberry. J. Elizabeth Siberry, a British historian.\n\n Tasso and the Crusades: history of a legacy (1993). An essay on Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) and his influential work La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (1581).\n Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1995). In the Oxford History of the Crusades.\n The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2000).\nDenis Sinor. Denis Sinor (1916–2011), a Hungarian scholar of the history of Central Asia.\n\n The Mongols and Western Europe (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990). Edited by D. Sinor. Contributions include Introduction: the Concept of Inner Asia; the Hun Period; and the Establishment and Dissolution of the Türk Empire.\n\nRaymond C. Smail. Raymond Charles Smail (1913-1986), a British historian and medievalist.\n\n Crusading Warfare (1097–1193) (1956).\n The Crusaders in Syria and the Holy Land. (1973).\nIndrikis Sterns. Indrikis Sterns (1928–2005), a Latvian-American medieval historian.\n\n The Teutonic Knights in the Crusader States (1985). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V, The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East.\n\nWilliam Barron Stevenson. William Barron Stevenson (1869-1954), a British historian.\n\n The Crusaders in the East (1907). A history of the Crusades from the Muslim viewpoint.\nJoseph R. Strayer. Joseph Reese Strayer (1904–1987) was an American medievalist, also serving as a member of the CIA's Office of National Estimates.\n\n Western Europe in the Middle Ages: a short history (1955).\n The Political Crusades of the Thirteenth Century (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe Crusades of Louis IX (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n The Albigensian Crusades (1971). With a new epilog by Carol Lansing in the 1992 edition.\n\nHeinrich von Sybel. Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895), a German historian.\n\n History and Literature of the Crusades (1861). Translated by Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon.\n\nTaef El-Azhari. Taef El-Azhari, an Egyptian historian specializing in the history of the Seljuk and Zengid dynasties.\n\n The Saljūqs of Syria: during the Crusades, 463-549 A.H./1070-1154 A.D (1997).\n Zengi and the Muslim response to the Crusades: The politics of jihad (2016).\n\nJames Westfall Thompson. James Westfall Thompson (1869–1941), an American historian specializing in the history of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly of the Holy Roman Empire and France.\n\n Economic and social history of the Middle Ages (300–1300), 2 volumes (1928).\n The Middle Ages, 300–1500, 2 volumes (1931).\nAn Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500 (1937). With Edgar N. Johnson.\n Medieval and historiographical essays: in honor of James Westfall Thompson (1938). Edited by James Lea Cate and Eugene N. Anderson.\n\nRobert W. Thomson. Robert William Thomson (1934–2018), a British-Armenian historian.\n\n The Crusaders through Armenian Eyes (2001). In The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (2001).\nPeter Topping. Peter Topping, a British historian.\n\n The Morea, 1311–1364 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n The Morea, 1364–1460 (1975). Ibid.\n\nBarbara W. Tuchman. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (1912–1989), an American historian.\n\n A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978).\n\nChristopher Tyerman. Christopher Tyerman (born 1953), a British historian focusing on the Crusades.\n\n The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction (2005).\n God's War: A New History of the Crusades (2006). The dust jacket announces God's War as \"the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story\" and compares it to Runciman's \"well-loved and much-published classic study of the Crusades.\"\n The Crusades (A Brief Insight) (2009).\n The Invention of the Crusades (1998).\n Modern Historiography (2006). In The Crusades: An Encyclopedia, edited by Alan V. Murray. A critical analysis of Crusader histories from the fifteenth century to the early twenty-first century.\n The Debate on the Crusades, 1099–2010 (2011). A study of how historians from the eleventh century to the present have developed accounts of the Crusades to suit changing contemporary circumstances and interests. Assessment of works by leading scholars from John Foxe, Gottfried Leibniz, Voltaire and Dave Hume, to historians such as William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and Leopold Ranke. Related the study of the Crusades to academic trends and controversies over the last hundred years, including twentieth-century works by Crusader scholars such as Carl Erdmann and Steven Runciman. In Issues in Historiography (2011)\n Bibliography of works by Christopher Tyerman.\nThomas C. Van Cleve. Thomas Curtis Van Cleve (1888–1976), and American historian of the Middle Ages.\n\n A Study of the Sources of the De Sphaera Mundi of Joannes de Sacrobosco or John Holywood (1921). A study of the astronomy work De sphaera mundi (The Sphere of the Cosmos or Tractatus de sphaera) by the medieval scholar Johannes de Sacrobosco (c. 1195 – c. 1256).\n Markward of Anweiler and the Sicilian Regency: a study of Hohenstaufen policy in Sicily during the minority of Frederick II (1937). A biography of Markward von Annweiler (died 1202), imperial seneschal and regent of the Kingdom of Sicily, who was the target of one of the early political crusades.\n The Fifth Crusade (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n The Crusade of Frederick II (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n\nHelene Wieruszowski. Helene Wieruszowski, an American scholar of medieval history.\n\n The Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Crusades (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\n\nRobert L. Wolff. Robert L. Wolff (1915–1980), an American historian.\n\n Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II. The Later Crusades, 1189–1311 (1969). Edited by R. Wolff (1915-1980) and Harry W. Hazard.\nThe Fourth Crusade (1969). With Edgar H. McNeal. In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe Latin Empire of Constantinople, 1224–1311 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II, The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nStudies in the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1976).\n\nNorman P. Zacour. Norman P. Zacour, an American historian of the Crusades.\n\n The Children's Crusade (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II. The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nWisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume V. The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East (1985). Edited by N. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard.\n Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume VI. The Impact of the Crusades on Europe (1989). Edited by N. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard.\nMuḥammad Muṣṭafā Ziyādaẗ. Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Ziyādaẗ (died 1968), an Egyptian medieval historian.\n\n The Mamluk Sultans to 1293 (1969). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume II. The Later Crusades 1187–1311.\nThe Mamluk Sultans, 1291–1517 (1975). In the Wisconsin Collaborative History of the Crusades, Volume III. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.\n\nBibliography for the historiography of the Crusades \nThe historiography of the Crusades (literally, the history of histories) includes the original sources and subsequent histories, as well as the study of how historians have interpreted the Crusades. This is a complex subject that several contemporary historians have provided their perspective. Prominent ones are discussed below. These include Tyerman's Modern Historiography and Constable's Historiography of the Crusades.\n\nOverview. Murray's The Crusades—An Encyclopedia includes a series of articles on the historiography of the Crusades, including the following.\n\n Modern Historiography, by Christopher Tyerman.\n Western Sources, by Susan Edgington and Alan V. Murray.\n Greek Sources, by Jonathan Harris.\n Arabic Sources, by Niall Christie.\n Armenian Sources, by Angus Stewart.\n Syriac Sources, by Dorothea Weltecke.\n Hebrew Sources, by Anna Sapir Abulafia.\n\nLouis R. Bréhier. Louis R. Bréhier (1869–1951), a French historian specializing in Byzantine studies.\n\n Crusades (Bibliography and Sources) (1908). A concise summary of the historiography of the Crusades. In the Catholic Encyclopedia.\n\nErnest Barker. Ernest Barker (1874–1960), an English political scientist.\n\n Crusades (1911). A summary of the history of the Crusades. Section 11. Literature of Crusades provides a view of the historiography of the Crusades. In the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.\n The Crusades (1923). A later edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica article, edited with additional notes.\n\nCarole Hillenbrand. Carole Hillenbrand (born 1943), a British Islamic scholar.\n\n A Muslim Principality in Crusader Times: the Early Artuqid state (1990). Based on her PhD thesis History of the Jazira, 1100–1150.\n The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (2000). Discusses themes that highlight how Muslims reacted to the presence of the Crusaders in the heart of traditionally Islamic territory. Examines ideological concerns and the importance of the jihad in the context of the gradual recovery of the Holy Land and the expulsion of the Crusaders.\n\nKonrad Hirschler. Konrad Hirschler, a German historian specializing on medieval Islam.\n\n Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (2006).\n The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative (2013). A comparative study of how Arabic historians treated the conquest of Jerusalem, with estimates of victims ranging from 70,000 to 100,0000. Historians considered include ibn al-Qalanisi (1071–1160), Ali ibn al-Athir (1160–1233), al-Azimi (1090 – after 1161), ibn al-Azraq al-Fariqi (1116–1176), Bar Hebraeus (1226–1286), Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani (1125–1201), al-Jazari (fl. 1290–1299), Kamal al-Din (1192–1262), Sibt ibn al-Jawzi (1185–1256), ibn Khallikan (1211–1282), Abu’l-Fida (Abu'l-Feda) (1273–1331), Al-Makrizi (1364–1442) and Diya al-Din al-Maqdisi.(1173–1245). \n Studying Mamluk Historiography. From Source-Criticism to the Cultural Turn (2013)\n Ibn Wāṣil: An Ayyūbid Perspective on Frankish Lordships and Crusades (2015). A study on the works of Syrian historian Ibn Wāṣil (1208–1298).\nIbn Khaldūn. 'Abd al-Raḥmār ibn Khaldūn (before 1337 – 1406), an Arab scholar of Islam, social scientist and historian, who has been described as the father of the modern discipline of historiography.\n\n Kitāb al-ʻIbar, 7 volumes (1337), Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the History of the Arabs and the Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries. Includes three parts: al-Muqaddimah (Prolegomena), a universal history of empires; A world history of events up to 1337; and Historiography of works from Arabic Africa.\n\nBernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), a British-American historian specialized in Oriental studies, particularly the Assassins.\n The Sources for the History of the Syrian Assassins, in Speculum, XXVII (1952).\nJonathan Riley-Smith. Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938–2016), a British historian of the Crusades.\n The Crusading Movement and Historians (1995). A discussion of the evolving view of historians to the Crusades. In The Oxford History of the Crusades.\nChristopher Tyerman. Christopher Tyerman (born 1953), a British historian focusing on the Crusades.\n Modern Historiography (2006). In The Crusades: An Encyclopedia. A critical analysis of Crusader histories from the fifteenth century to the early twenty-first century.\n The Invention of the Crusades (1998). Particularly, Proteus Unbound: Crusading Historiography. A historical study of the Crusades from the original sources of the First Crusade through the nineteenth century.\n The Debate on the Crusades, 1099–2010 (2011). A study of how historians from the eleventh century to the present have developed accounts of the Crusades to suit changing contemporary circumstances and interests. Assessment of works by leading scholars from John Foxe, Gottfried Leibniz, Voltaire and Dave Hume, to historians such as William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and Leopold Ranke. Related the study of the Crusades to academic trends and controversies over the last hundred years, including twentieth-century works by Crusader scholars such as Carl Erdmann and Steven Runciman. In Issues in Historiography (2011).\n\nMikhail Abramovich Zaborov. Mikhail Abramovich Zaborov (20th century), a Russian historian of the Crusades.\n\n Introduction to the Historiography of the Crusades (1966), in Russian.\n Historiography of the Crusades [15th–19th century] (1971), in Russian.\n\nFurther works on the historiography of the Crusades, Western view. Additional works presenting the Western viewpoint of the topic of historiography, some previously cited, include the following.\n\n History and Literature of the Crusades (1861), by Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895), translated by Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon. Particularly, Part II: Literature of the Crusades.\n Recent Developments in Crusading Historiography (1937), by T. S. R. Boase (1898–1974). In History, Volume 22.\n Some Problems in Crusading Historiography (1940), by John L. La Monte (1902–1949). In Speculum, Volume 15 (1940), pp. 57–75.\n The Origin of the Idea of Crusade (1977), by Carl Erdmann (1898–1945). Translation by Marshall W. Baldwin (1903–1975) and Walter Goffart (born 1934).\n The Historiography of the Crusades (2001), by Giles Constable (1929–2021). In The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World .\n Introduction to the Historiography of the Crusades (1966) and Historiography of the Crusades [15th–19th century] (1971), both in Russian. By Mikhail Abramovich Zaborov,\n The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (1962) and The Crusades, Motives and Achievements (1964), by James A. Brundage.\n Recent Crusade Historiography: Some Observations and Suggestions (1964) by James A. Brundage. In Catholic Historical Review (CHR) 49.\n The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2000). By British historian J. Elizabeth Siberry.\n The Historiography of Islamic Egypt, c. 950-1800 (2000). By British historian Hugh N. Kennedy.\n Les Gestes des Chiprois et la tradition historiographique de l'Orient latin (2004). By Laura Minervini.\n Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2018). Edited by Jonathan P. Phillips. An exploration of the ways in which the Crusades have been used in the last two centuries, including the varying uses of Crusading rhetoric and imagery.\n Medieval and historiographical essays: in honor of James Westfall Thompson (1938). Edited by James Lea Cate and Eugene N. Anderson.\n The Literature and Historiography of the Baltic Crusade (2001). Edited by Alan V. Murray. In Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier, 1150–1500.\n Crusaders and Historians (2005), by Thomas F. Madden.\nThe Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades (2004), by Benjamin Z. Kedar.\n\nByzantine, Islamic, Jewish and Armenian views on the Crusades. Works that present the historiography of the Crusades from Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish or Armenian viewpoints included the following.\n\n The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (2001). Edited by Greek-American Byzantinist Angeliki E. Laiou (1941–2008) and American historian Roy Parviz Mottahedeh.\n Arabic Historiography of the Crusades (1962) and Arab Historians of the Crusades (1969), by Italian Arabist and orientalist Francesco Gabrieli (1904–1996).\n The Crusade: Historiography and Bibliography (1962), by Egyptian Coptologist Aziz Suryal Atiya (1898–1988).\n The Crusaders in the East (1907), by William Barron Stevenson (1869-1954). A history of the Crusades from the Muslim viewpoint.\n History of the Jews, 6 volumes (1853–1875), by Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891). The Crusades from a Jewish viewpoint are covered in Volume 3.\n The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (2000), by British Islamic scholar Carole Hillenbrand.\nHistoriography of the Seljuqid period (1962), by French orientalist Claude Cahen.\n The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period (638–1099) (1996). By Israeli historian Joshua Prawer (1917–1990).\n The Crusaders through Armenian Eyes (2001), by British Armenian historian Robert William Thomson (1934–2018). In The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (2001).\n Islamic historiography (2016). By Heidi R. Krauss-Sánchez and Paulina López Pita. In the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle.\n\nReferences"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know.",
"when did they go on a crusade",
"1188",
"where did they go",
"on the Third Crusade,",
"what countries did they go to",
"London if I",
"where in the world were the crusades",
"I don't know."
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 7 |
Besides Richard I starting a crusader army as a part of the Third Crusade, are there any other interesting aspects of this article?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross.
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| true |
[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know.",
"when did they go on a crusade",
"1188",
"where did they go",
"on the Third Crusade,",
"what countries did they go to",
"London if I",
"where in the world were the crusades",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross."
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
did he really repent
| 8 |
Did Richard I really repent of past wickedness in order to join the crusade?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| true |
[
"A Thousand Times Repent was a Christian deathcore band that was last signed to Tribunal Records, a record label that also holds bands such as He Is Legend, Century, and Prayer for Cleansing. The band released an EP, titled Virtue Has Few Friends, before disbanding, due to losing their drummer and not finding a replacement. The EP has received multiple good reviews.\n\nMusical style\nDespite the band labeling themselves metalcore, many believe that deathcore, grindcore, or death metal describes them better.\n\nName\nThe band's bio on Last.fm, most likely written by a band member, writes: \"A Thousand Times Repent, is a narrative of these divisions. Simply stated, we are six who have chosen to embrace the notion that there exists something far beyond ourselves. We are both aware and openly acknowledge our flaws and many blemishes. However we have decided that floundering in our faults is a road too often traveled.\"\n\nMembers\nLast known line-up\n Darsen Avery - vocals (2006-2011) (ex-Downpour)\n Nate Ledford - guitar (2006-2011)\n Chris Dowd - guitar (2006-2011)\n Jeremy Hopkins - bass (2008-2011) (ex-To Bow or to Burn, Call Me Ishmael)\n\nFormer members\n Chris Van Valkenburg - guitar (2006-2010)\n Blake Williams - bass (2006-2008)\n Shannon Hill - drums (2006-2011) (Postulate)\n\nTimeline\n\nDiscography\n Virtue Has Few Friends (2007; EP)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nA Thousand Times Repent on Facebook\nA Thousand Times Repent on Myspace\n\nMusical groups established in 2006\nMusical groups disestablished in 2011\nChristian extreme metal groups\nAmerican Christian metal musical groups\nAmerican death metal musical groups\nAmerican metalcore musical groups\nAmerican deathcore musical groups",
"Ibrahim ibn Khalid al-Kalbi al-Baghdadi (764–854) better known as Abu Thawr () was an early scholar of Islam. He was born in 170 AH.\n\nA personal school was built by the followers of Abu Thawr which disappeared by the 4th century Hijra.\nAbu Thawr was asked, \"Who are the Qadariyyah?\" and he replied:\n\n\" The Qadariyyah are those who say Allaah did not create the actions of the servants and that Allah did not decree acts of disobedience for the servants and that He did not create them (the acts of disobedience). Therefore these Qadariyyah are not be prayed behind, nor are their sick to be visited and nor are their funerals to be attended. Their repentance from this saying should be sought. If they repent (then so) and if not then their necks are to be struck.\"\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n Wael B. Hallaq. The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 168\n\n760s births\n854 deaths\n9th-century Muslim scholars of Islam\nGrand Muftis of Iraq"
] |
[
"Richard I of England",
"Crusade plans",
"was richard involved in the crusades",
"cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army.",
"how many people were there",
"I don't know.",
"when did they go on a crusade",
"1188",
"where did they go",
"on the Third Crusade,",
"what countries did they go to",
"London if I",
"where in the world were the crusades",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross.",
"did he really repent",
"He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He"
] |
C_529d20afedfd4c059a95c5bb24f88f80_1
|
how big was the army
| 9 |
How big was Richard I's crusader army?
|
Richard I of England
|
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories. Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for 10,000 marks. To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's Chancellor, made a show of bidding PS3,000 to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused. Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, was elevated to the post of seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally in Gascony the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship there. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex--who soon died and was replaced by Richard's chancellor William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer". CANNOTANSWER
|
for 10,000
|
Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death in 1199. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubadour Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.
By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was an important Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading the campaign after the departure of Philip II of France and achieving considerable victories against his Muslim counterpart, Saladin, although he finalised a peace treaty and ended the campaign without retaking Jerusalem.
Richard probably spoke both French and Occitan. He was born in England, where he spent his childhood; before becoming king, however, he lived most of his adult life in the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. Following his accession, he spent very little time, perhaps as little as six months, in England. Most of his life as king was spent on Crusade, in captivity, or actively defending his lands in France. Rather than regarding his kingdom as a responsibility requiring his presence as ruler, he has been perceived as preferring to use it merely as a source of revenue to support his armies. Nevertheless, he was seen as a pious hero by his subjects. He remains one of the few kings of England remembered more commonly by his epithet than his regnal number, and is an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France.
Early life and accession in Aquitaine
Childhood
Richard was born on 8 September 1157, probably at Beaumont Palace, in Oxford, England, son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was a younger brother of Henry the Young King and Matilda, Duchess of Saxony. As a younger son of King Henry II, he was not expected to ascend the throne. He was also an elder brother of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany; Queen Eleanor of Castile; Queen Joan of Sicily; and John, Count of Mortain, who succeeded him as king. Richard was the younger maternal half-brother of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and Alix, Countess of Blois. Henry II and Eleanor's eldest son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died before Richard's birth. Richard is often depicted as having been the favourite son of his mother. His father was Angevin-Norman and great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Contemporary historian Ralph de Diceto traced his family's lineage through Matilda of Scotland to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England and Alfred the Great, and from there legend linked them to Noah and Woden. According to Angevin family tradition, there was even 'infernal blood' in their ancestry, with a claimed descent from the fairy, or female demon, Melusine.
While his father visited his lands from Scotland to France, Richard probably spent his childhood in England. His first recorded visit to the European continent was in May 1165, when his mother took him to Normandy. His wet nurse was Hodierna of St Albans, whom he gave a generous pension after he became king. Little is known about Richard's education. Although he was born in Oxford and brought up in England up to his eighth year, it is not known to what extent he used or understood English; he was an educated man who composed poetry and wrote in Limousin () and also in French. During his captivity, English prejudice against foreigners was used in a calculated way by his brother John to help destroy the authority of Richard's chancellor, William Longchamp, who was a Norman. One of the specific charges laid against Longchamp, by John's supporter Hugh Nonant, was that he could not speak English. This indicates that by the late 12th century a knowledge of English was expected of those in positions of authority in England.
Richard was said to be very attractive; his hair was between red and blond, and he was light-eyed with a pale complexion. According to Clifford Brewer, he was , though that is unverifiable since his remains have been lost since at least the French Revolution. John, his youngest brother, was known to be . The , a Latin prose narrative of the Third Crusade, states that: "He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had long arms suited to wielding a sword. His long legs matched the rest of his body".
From an early age, Richard showed significant political and military ability, becoming noted for his chivalry and courage as he fought to control the rebellious nobles of his own territory.
Marriage alliances were common among medieval royalty: they led to political alliances and peace treaties and allowed families to stake claims of succession on each other's lands. In March 1159 it was arranged that Richard would marry one of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona; however, these arrangements failed, and the marriage never took place. Henry the Young King was married to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, on 2 November 1160. Despite this alliance between the Plantagenets and the Capetians, the dynasty on the French throne, the two houses were sometimes in conflict. In 1168, the intercession of Pope Alexander III was necessary to secure a truce between them. Henry II had conquered Brittany and taken control of Gisors and the Vexin, which had been part of Margaret's dowry.
Early in the 1160s there had been suggestions Richard should marry Alys, Countess of the Vexin, fourth daughter of Louis VII; because of the rivalry between the kings of England and France, Louis obstructed the marriage. A peace treaty was secured in January 1169 and Richard's betrothal to Alys was confirmed. Henry II planned to divide his and Eleanor's territories among their three eldest surviving sons: Henry would become King of England and have control of Anjou, Maine, and Normandy; Richard would inherit Aquitaine and Poitiers from his mother; and Geoffrey would become Duke of Brittany through marriage with Constance, heir presumptive of Conan IV. At the ceremony where Richard's betrothal was confirmed, he paid homage to the King of France for Aquitaine, thus securing ties of vassalage between the two.
After Henry II fell seriously ill in 1170, he enacted his plan to divide his territories, although he would retain overall authority over his sons and their territories. Young Henry was crowned as heir apparent in June 1170, and in 1171 Richard left for Aquitaine with his mother, and Henry II gave him the duchy of Aquitaine at the request of Eleanor. Richard and his mother embarked on a tour of Aquitaine in 1171 in an attempt to pacify the locals. Together they laid the foundation stone of St Augustine's Monastery in Limoges. In June 1172, at age 12, Richard was formally recognised as the duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou when he was granted the lance and banner emblems of his office; the ceremony took place in Poitiers and was repeated in Limoges, where he wore the ring of St Valerie, who was the personification of Aquitaine.
Revolt against Henry II
According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Henry the Young King instigated rebellion against Henry II; he wanted to reign independently over at least part of the territory his father had promised him, and to break away from his dependence on Henry II, who controlled the purse strings. There were rumors that Eleanor might have encouraged her sons to revolt against their father.
Henry the Young King abandoned his father and left for the French court, seeking the protection of Louis VII; his younger brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, soon followed him, while the five-year-old John remained in England. Louis gave his support to the three brothers and even knighted Richard, tying them together through vassalage.
Jordan Fantosme, a contemporary poet, described the rebellion as a "war without love".
The brothers made an oath at the French court that they would not make terms with Henry II without the consent of Louis VII and the French barons. With the support of Louis, Henry the Young King attracted many barons to his cause through promises of land and money; one such baron was Philip I, Count of Flanders, who was promised £1,000 and several castles. The brothers also had supporters ready to rise up in England. Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester, joined forces with Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, and William I of Scotland for a rebellion in Suffolk. The alliance with Louis was initially successful, and by July 1173 the rebels were besieging Aumale, Neuf-Marché, and Verneuil, and Hugh de Kevelioc had captured Dol in Brittany. Richard went to Poitou and raised the barons who were loyal to himself and his mother in rebellion against his father. Eleanor was captured, so Richard was left to lead his campaign against Henry II's supporters in Aquitaine on his own. He marched to take La Rochelle but was rejected by the inhabitants; he withdrew to the city of Saintes, which he established as a base of operations.
In the meantime, Henry II had raised a very expensive army of more than 20,000 mercenaries with which to face the rebellion. He marched on Verneuil, and Louis retreated from his forces. The army proceeded to recapture Dol and subdued Brittany. At this point Henry II made an offer of peace to his sons; on the advice of Louis the offer was refused. Henry II's forces took Saintes by surprise and captured much of its garrison, although Richard was able to escape with a small group of soldiers. He took refuge in Château de Taillebourg for the rest of the war. Henry the Young King and the Count of Flanders planned to land in England to assist the rebellion led by the Earl of Leicester. Anticipating this, Henry II returned to England with 500 soldiers and his prisoners (including Eleanor and his sons' wives and fiancées), but on his arrival found out that the rebellion had already collapsed. William I of Scotland and Hugh Bigod were captured on 13 and 25 July respectively. Henry II returned to France and raised the siege of Rouen, where Louis VII had been joined by Henry the Young King after abandoning his plan to invade England. Louis was defeated and a peace treaty was signed in September 1174, the Treaty of Montlouis.
When Henry II and Louis VII made a truce on 8 September 1174, its terms specifically excluded Richard. Abandoned by Louis and wary of facing his father's army in battle, Richard went to Henry II's court at Poitiers on 23 September and begged for forgiveness, weeping and falling at the feet of Henry, who gave Richard the kiss of peace. Several days later, Richard's brothers joined him in seeking reconciliation with their father. The terms the three brothers accepted were less generous than those they had been offered earlier in the conflict (when Richard was offered four castles in Aquitaine and half of the income from the duchy): Richard was given control of two castles in Poitou and half the income of Aquitaine; Henry the Young King was given two castles in Normandy; and Geoffrey was permitted half of Brittany. Eleanor remained Henry II's prisoner until his death, partly as insurance for Richard's good behaviour.
Final years of Henry II's reign
After the conclusion of the war, the process of pacifying the provinces that had rebelled against Henry II began. The King travelled to Anjou for this purpose, and Geoffrey dealt with Brittany. In January 1175 Richard was dispatched to Aquitaine to punish the barons who had fought for him. The historian John Gillingham notes that the chronicle of Roger of Howden is the main source for Richard's activities in this period. According to the chronicle, most of the castles belonging to rebels were to be returned to the state they were in 15 days before the outbreak of war, while others were to be razed. Given that by this time it was common for castles to be built in stone, and that many barons had expanded or refortified their castles, this was not an easy task. Roger of Howden records the two-month siege of Castillon-sur-Agen; while the castle was "notoriously strong", Richard's siege engines battered the defenders into submission.
On this campaign, Richard acquired the name "the Lion" or "the Lionheart" due to his noble, brave and fierce leadership. He is referred to as "this our lion" () as early as 1187 in the of , while the byname "lionheart" () is first recorded in Ambroise's in the context of the Accon campaign of 1191.
Henry seemed unwilling to entrust any of his sons with resources that could be used against him. It was suspected that Henry had appropriated Alys, Richard's betrothed, the daughter of Louis VII of France by his second wife, as his mistress. This made a marriage between Richard and Alys technically impossible in the eyes of the Church, but Henry prevaricated: he regarded Alys's dowry, Vexin in the Île-de-France, as valuable. Richard was discouraged from renouncing Alys because she was the sister of King Philip II of France, a close ally.
After his failure to overthrow his father, Richard concentrated on putting down internal revolts by the nobles of Aquitaine, especially in the territory of Gascony. The increasing cruelty of his rule led to a major revolt there in 1179. Hoping to dethrone Richard, the rebels sought the help of his brothers Henry and Geoffrey. The turning point came in the Charente Valley in the spring of 1179. The well-defended fortress of Taillebourg seemed impregnable. The castle was surrounded by a cliff on three sides and a town on the fourth side with a three-layer wall. Richard first destroyed and looted the farms and lands surrounding the fortress, leaving its defenders no reinforcements or lines of retreat. The garrison sallied out of the castle and attacked Richard; he was able to subdue the army and then followed the defenders inside the open gates, where he easily took over the castle in two days. Richard the Lionheart's victory at Taillebourg deterred many barons from thinking of rebelling and forced them to declare their loyalty to him. It also won Richard a reputation as a skilled military commander.
In 1181–1182 Richard faced a revolt over the succession to the county of Angoulême. His opponents turned to Philip II of France for support, and the fighting spread through the Limousin and Périgord. The excessive cruelty of Richard's punitive campaigns aroused even more hostility. However, with support from his father and from the Young King, Richard the Lionheart eventually succeeded in bringing the Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Count Elie of Périgord to terms.
After Richard had subdued his rebellious barons he again challenged his father. From 1180 to 1183 the tension between Henry and Richard grew, as King Henry commanded Richard to pay homage to Henry the Young King, but Richard refused. Finally, in 1183 Henry the Young King and Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, invaded Aquitaine in an attempt to subdue Richard. Richard's barons joined in the fray and turned against their duke. However, Richard and his army succeeded in holding back the invading armies, and they executed any prisoners. The conflict paused briefly in June 1183 when the Young King died. With the death of Henry the Young King, Richard became the eldest surviving son and therefore heir to the English crown. King Henry demanded that Richard give up Aquitaine (which he planned to give to his youngest son John as his inheritance). Richard refused, and conflict continued between them. Henry II soon gave John permission to invade Aquitaine.
To strengthen his position, in 1187, Richard allied himself with 22-year-old Philip II, the son of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII by Adela of Champagne. Roger of Howden wrote:
The King of England was struck with great astonishment, and wondered what [this alliance] could mean, and, taking precautions for the future, frequently sent messengers into France for the purpose of recalling his son Richard; who, pretending that he was peaceably inclined and ready to come to his father, made his way to Chinon, and, in spite of the person who had the custody thereof, carried off the greater part of his father's treasures, and fortified his castles in Poitou with the same, refusing to go to his father.
Overall, Howden is chiefly concerned with the politics of the relationship between Richard and King Philip. Gillingham has addressed theories suggesting that this political relationship was also sexually intimate, which he posits probably stemmed from an official record announcing that, as a symbol of unity between the two countries, the kings of England and France had slept overnight in the same bed. Gillingham has characterized this as "an accepted political act, nothing sexual about it;... a bit like a modern-day photo opportunity".
In exchange for Philip's help against his father, Richard promised to concede to him his rights to both Normandy and Anjou. Richard paid homage to Philip in November 1187. With news arriving of the Battle of Hattin, he took the cross at Tours in the company of other French nobles.
In 1188 Henry II planned to concede Aquitaine to his youngest son John. But Richard objected. He felt that Aquitaine was his and that John was unfit to take over the land once belonging to his mother. This refusal is what finally made Henry II bring Queen Eleanor out of prison. He sent her to Aquitaine and demanded that Richard give up his lands to his mother, who would once again rule over those lands.
The following year, Richard attempted to take the throne of England for himself by joining Philip's expedition against his father. On 4 July 1189, the forces of Richard and Philip defeated Henry's army at Ballans. Henry, with John's consent, agreed to name Richard his heir apparent. Two days later Henry II died in Chinon, and Richard the Lionheart succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy, and Count of Anjou. Roger of Howden claimed that Henry's corpse bled from the nose in Richard's presence, which was assumed to be a sign that Richard had caused his death.
King and crusader
Coronation and anti-Jewish violence
Richard I was officially invested as Duke of Normandy on 20 July 1189 and crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189. Tradition barred all Jews and women from the investiture, but some Jewish leaders arrived to present gifts for the new king. According to Ralph of Diceto, Richard's courtiers stripped and flogged the Jews, then flung them out of court.
When a rumour spread that Richard had ordered all Jews to be killed, the people of London attacked the Jewish population. Many Jewish homes were destroyed by arsonists, and several Jews were forcibly converted. Some sought sanctuary in the Tower of London, and others managed to escape. Among those killed was Jacob of Orléans, a respected Jewish scholar. Roger of Howden, in his , claimed that the jealous and bigoted citizens started the rioting, and that Richard punished the perpetrators, allowing a forcibly converted Jew to return to his native religion. Baldwin of Forde, Archbishop of Canterbury, reacted by remarking, "If the King is not God's man, he had better be the devil's".
Offended that he was not being obeyed and realising that the assaults could destabilise his realm on the eve of his departure on crusade, Richard ordered the execution of those responsible for the most egregious murders and persecutions, including rioters who had accidentally burned down Christian homes. He distributed a royal writ demanding that the Jews be left alone. The edict was only loosely enforced, however, and the following March further violence occurred, including a massacre at York.
Crusade plans
Richard had already taken the cross as Count of Poitou in 1187. His father and Philip II had done so at Gisors on 21 January 1188 after receiving news of the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. After Richard became king, he and Philip agreed to go on the Third Crusade, since each feared that during his absence the other might usurp his territories.
Richard swore an oath to renounce his past wickedness in order to show himself worthy to take the cross. He started to raise and equip a new crusader army. He spent most of his father's treasury (filled with money raised by the Saladin tithe), raised taxes, and even agreed to free King William I of Scotland from his oath of subservience to Richard in exchange for marks (£). To raise still more revenue he sold the right to hold official positions, lands, and other privileges to those interested in them. Those already appointed were forced to pay huge sums to retain their posts. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and the King's chancellor, made a show of bidding £ to remain as Chancellor. He was apparently outbid by a certain Reginald the Italian, but that bid was refused.
Richard made some final arrangements on the continent. He reconfirmed his father's appointment of William Fitz Ralph to the important post of seneschal of Normandy. In Anjou, Stephen of Tours was replaced as seneschal and temporarily imprisoned for fiscal mismanagement. Payn de Rochefort, an Angevin knight, became seneschal of Anjou. In Poitou the ex-provost of Benon, Peter Bertin, was made seneschal, and finally, the household official Helie de La Celle was picked for the seneschalship in Gascony. After repositioning the part of his army he left behind to guard his French possessions, Richard finally set out on the crusade in summer 1190. (His delay was criticised by troubadours such as Bertran de Born.) He appointed as regents Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, and William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex—who soon died and was replaced by William Longchamp. Richard's brother John was not satisfied by this decision and started scheming against William Longchamp. When Richard was raising funds for his crusade, he was said to declare, "I would have sold London if I could find a buyer".
Occupation of Sicily
In September 1190 Richard and Philip arrived in Sicily. After the death of King William II of Sicily in 1189 his cousin Tancred had seized power, although the legal heir was William's aunt Constance, wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Tancred had imprisoned William's widow, Queen Joan, who was Richard's sister and did not give her the money she had inherited in William's will. When Richard arrived he demanded that his sister be released and given her inheritance; she was freed on 28 September, but without the inheritance. The presence of foreign troops also caused unrest: in October, the people of Messina revolted, demanding that the foreigners leave. Richard attacked Messina, capturing it on 4 October 1190. After looting and burning the city Richard established his base there, but this created tension between Richard and Philip. He remained there until Tancred finally agreed to sign a treaty on 4 March 1191. The treaty was signed by Richard, Philip, and Tancred. Its main terms were:
Joan was to receive of gold as compensation for her inheritance, which Tancred kept.
Richard officially proclaimed his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, son of Geoffrey, as his heir, and Tancred promised to marry one of his daughters to Arthur when he came of age, giving a further of gold that would be returned by Richard if Arthur did not marry Tancred's daughter.
The two kings stayed on in Sicily for a while, but this resulted in increasing tensions between them and their men, with Philip plotting with Tancred against Richard. The two kings finally met to clear the air and reached an agreement, including the end of Richard's betrothal to Philip's sister Alys.
Conquest of Cyprus
In April 1191 Richard left Messina for Acre, but a storm dispersed his large fleet. After some searching, it was discovered that the ship carrying his sister Joan and his new fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre, was anchored on the south coast of Cyprus, along with the wrecks of several other vessels, including the treasure ship. Survivors of the wrecks had been taken prisoner by the island's ruler, Isaac Komnenos.
On 1 May 1191 Richard's fleet arrived in the port of Lemesos on Cyprus. He ordered Isaac to release the prisoners and treasure. Isaac refused, so Richard landed his troops and took Limassol. Various princes of the Holy Land arrived in Limassol at the same time, in particular Guy of Lusignan. All declared their support for Richard provided that he support Guy against his rival, Conrad of Montferrat.
The local magnates abandoned Isaac, who considered making peace with Richard, joining him on the crusade, and offering his daughter in marriage to the person named by Richard. Isaac changed his mind, however, and tried to escape. Richard's troops, led by Guy de Lusignan, conquered the whole island by 1 June. Isaac surrendered and was confined with silver chains because Richard had promised that he would not place him in irons. Richard named Richard de Camville and Robert of Thornham as governors. He later sold the island to the master of Knights Templar, Robert de Sablé, and it was subsequently acquired, in 1192, by Guy of Lusignan and became a stable feudal kingdom.
The rapid conquest of the island by Richard was of strategic importance. The island occupies a key strategic position on the maritime lanes to the Holy Land, whose occupation by the Christians could not continue without support from the sea. Cyprus remained a Christian stronghold until the Ottoman invasion in 1570. Richard's exploit was well publicised and contributed to his reputation, and he also derived significant financial gains from the conquest of the island. Richard left Cyprus for Acre on 5 June with his allies.
Marriage
Before leaving Cyprus on crusade, Richard married Berengaria, the first-born daughter of King Sancho VI of Navarre. Richard first grew close to her at a tournament held in her native Navarre. The wedding was held in Limassol on 12 May 1191 at the Chapel of St George and was attended by Richard's sister Joan, whom he had brought from Sicily. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, many feasts and entertainments, and public parades and celebrations followed commemorating the event. When Richard married Berengaria he was still officially betrothed to Alys, and he pushed for the match in order to obtain the Kingdom of Navarre as a fief, as Aquitaine had been for his father. Further, Eleanor championed the match, as Navarre bordered Aquitaine, thereby securing the southern border of her ancestral lands. Richard took his new wife on crusade with him briefly, though they returned separately. Berengaria had almost as much difficulty in making the journey home as her husband did, and she did not see England until after his death. After his release from German captivity, Richard showed some regret for his earlier conduct, but he was not reunited with his wife. The marriage remained childless.
In the Holy Land
Richard landed at Acre on 8 June 1191. He gave his support to his Poitevin vassal Guy of Lusignan, who had brought troops to help him in Cyprus. Guy was the widower of his father's cousin Sibylla of Jerusalem and was trying to retain the kingship of Jerusalem, despite his wife's death during the Siege of Acre the previous year. Guy's claim was challenged by Conrad of Montferrat, second husband of Sibylla's half-sister, Isabella: Conrad, whose defence of Tyre had saved the kingdom in 1187, was supported by Philip of France, son of his first cousin Louis VII of France, and by another cousin, Leopold V, Duke of Austria. Richard also allied with Humphrey IV of Toron, Isabella's first husband, from whom she had been forcibly divorced in 1190. Humphrey was loyal to Guy and spoke Arabic fluently, so Richard used him as a translator and negotiator.
Richard and his forces aided in the capture of Acre, despite Richard's serious illness. At one point, while sick from arnaldia, a disease similar to scurvy, he picked off guards on the walls with a crossbow, while being carried on a stretcher covered "in a great silken quilt". Eventually, Conrad of Montferrat concluded the surrender negotiations with Saladin's forces inside Acre and raised the banners of the kings in the city. Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria over the deposition of Isaac Komnenos (related to Leopold's Byzantine mother) and his position within the crusade. Leopold's banner had been raised alongside the English and French standards. This was interpreted as arrogance by both Richard and Philip, as Leopold was a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor (although he was the highest-ranking surviving leader of the imperial forces). Richard's men tore the flag down and threw it in the moat of Acre. Leopold left the crusade immediately. Philip also left soon afterwards, in poor health and after further disputes with Richard over the status of Cyprus (Philip demanded half the island) and the kingship of Jerusalem. Richard, suddenly, found himself without allies.
Richard had kept 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostages against Saladin fulfilling all the terms of the surrender of the lands around Acre. Philip, before leaving, had entrusted his prisoners to Conrad, but Richard forced him to hand them over to him. Richard feared his forces being bottled up in Acre as he believed his campaign could not advance with the prisoners in train. He, therefore, ordered all the prisoners executed. He then moved south, defeating Saladin's forces at the Battle of Arsuf north of Jaffa on 7 September 1191. Saladin attempted to harass Richard's army into breaking its formation in order to defeat it in detail. Richard maintained his army's defensive formation, however, until the Hospitallers broke ranks to charge the right wing of Saladin's forces. Richard then ordered a general counterattack, which won the battle. Arsuf was an important victory. The Muslim army was not destroyed, despite the considerable casualties it suffered, but it did rout; this was considered shameful by the Muslims and boosted the morale of the Crusaders. In November 1191, following the fall of Jaffa, the Crusader army advanced inland towards Jerusalem. The army then marched to Beit Nuba, only 12 miles from Jerusalem. Muslim morale in Jerusalem was so low that the arrival of the Crusaders would probably have caused the city to fall quickly. However, the weather was appallingly bad, cold with heavy rain and hailstorms; this, combined with the fear that the Crusader army, if it besieged Jerusalem, might be trapped by a relieving force, led to the decision to retreat back to the coast. Richard attempted to negotiate with Saladin, but this was unsuccessful. In the first half of 1192, he and his troops refortified Ascalon.
An election forced Richard to accept Conrad of Montferrat as King of Jerusalem, and he sold Cyprus to his defeated protégé, Guy. Only days later, on 28 April 1192, Conrad was stabbed to death by the Assassins before he could be crowned. Eight days later Richard's own nephew Henry II of Champagne was married to the widowed Isabella, although she was carrying Conrad's child. The murder has never been conclusively solved, and Richard's contemporaries widely suspected his involvement.
The crusader army made another advance on Jerusalem, and in June 1192 it came within sight of the city before being forced to retreat once again, this time because of dissension amongst its leaders. In particular, Richard and the majority of the army council wanted to force Saladin to relinquish Jerusalem by attacking the basis of his power through an invasion of Egypt. The leader of the French contingent, Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy, however, was adamant that a direct attack on Jerusalem should be made. This split the Crusader army into two factions, and neither was strong enough to achieve its objective. Richard stated that he would accompany any attack on Jerusalem but only as a simple soldier; he refused to lead the army. Without a united command the army had little choice but to retreat back to the coast.
There commenced a period of minor skirmishes with Saladin's forces, punctuated by another defeat in the field for the Ayyubid army at the Battle of Jaffa. Baha' al-Din, a contemporary Muslim soldier and biographer of Saladin, recorded a tribute to Richard's martial prowess at this battle: "I have been assured ... that on that day the king of England, lance in hand, rode along the whole length of our army from right to left, and not one of our soldiers left the ranks to attack him. The Sultan was wroth thereat and left the battlefield in anger...". Both sides realised that their respective positions were growing untenable. Richard knew that both Philip and his own brother John were starting to plot against him, and the morale of Saladin's army had been badly eroded by repeated defeats. However, Saladin insisted on the razing of Ascalon's fortifications, which Richard's men had rebuilt, and a few other points. Richard made one last attempt to strengthen his bargaining position by attempting to invade Egypt – Saladin's chief supply-base – but failed. In the end, time ran out for Richard. He realised that his return could be postponed no longer, since both Philip and John were taking advantage of his absence. He and Saladin finally came to a settlement on 2 September 1192. The terms provided for the destruction of Ascalon's fortifications, allowed Christian pilgrims and merchants access to Jerusalem, and initiated a three-year truce. Richard, being ill with arnaldia, left for England on 9 October 1192.
Life after the Third Crusade
Captivity, ransom and return
Bad weather forced Richard's ship to put in at Corfu, in the lands of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who objected to Richard's annexation of Cyprus, formerly Byzantine territory. Disguised as a Knight Templar, Richard sailed from Corfu with four attendants, but his ship was wrecked near Aquileia, forcing Richard and his party into a dangerous land route through central Europe. On his way to the territory of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Richard was captured shortly before Christmas 1192 near Vienna by Leopold of Austria, who accused Richard of arranging the murder of his cousin Conrad of Montferrat. Moreover, Richard had personally offended Leopold by casting down his standard from the walls of Acre.
Leopold kept Richard prisoner at Dürnstein Castle under the care of Leopold's Hadmar of Kuenring. His mishap was soon known to England, but the regents were for some weeks uncertain of his whereabouts. While in prison, Richard wrote or ("No man who is imprisoned"), which is addressed to his half-sister Marie. He wrote the song, in French and Occitan versions, to express his feelings of abandonment by his people and his sister. The detention of a crusader was contrary to public law, and on these grounds Pope Celestine III excommunicated Duke Leopold.
On 28 March 1193 Richard was brought to Speyer and handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in Trifels Castle. Henry VI was aggrieved by the support the Plantagenets had given to the family of Henry the Lion and by Richard's recognition of Tancred in Sicily. Henry VI needed money to raise an army and assert his rights over southern Italy and continued to hold Richard for ransom. Nevertheless, to Richard's irritation, Celestine hesitated to excommunicate Henry VI, as he had Duke Leopold, for the continued wrongful imprisonment of Richard. Richard famously refused to show deference to the Emperor and declared to him, "I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God". The king was at first shown a certain measure of respect, but later, at the prompting of Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and Philip of France's cousin, the conditions of Richard's captivity were worsened, and he was kept in chains, "so heavy," Richard declared, "that a horse or ass would have struggled to move under them."
The Emperor demanded that marks (100,000 pounds of silver) be delivered to him before he would release the King, the same amount raised by the Saladin tithe only a few years earlier, and two to three times the annual income for the English Crown under Richard. Richard's mother, Eleanor, worked to raise the ransom. Both clergy and laymen were taxed for a quarter of the value of their property, the gold and silver treasures of the churches were confiscated, and money was raised from the scutage and the carucage taxes. At the same time, John, Richard's brother, and King Philip of France offered marks for Henry VI to hold Richard prisoner until Michaelmas 1194. Henry turned down the offer. The money to rescue the King was transferred to Germany by the Emperor's ambassadors, but "at the king's peril" (had it been lost along the way, Richard would have been held responsible), and finally, on 4 February 1194 Richard was released. Philip sent a message to John: "Look to yourself; the devil is loose".
War against Philip of France
In Richard's absence, his brother John revolted with the aid of Philip; amongst Philip's conquests in the period of Richard's imprisonment was Normandy. Richard forgave John when they met again and named him as his heir in place of their nephew, Arthur. At Winchester, on 11 March 1194, Richard was crowned a second time to nullify the shame of his captivity.
Richard began his reconquest of Normandy. The fall of the Château de Gisors to the French in 1193 opened a gap in the Norman defences. The search began for a fresh site for a new castle to defend the duchy of Normandy and act as a base from which Richard could launch his campaign to take back Vexin from French control. A naturally defensible position was identified, perched high above the River Seine, an important transport route, in the manor of Andeli. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers (December 1195) between Richard and Philip II, neither king was allowed to fortify the site; despite this, Richard intended to build the vast Château Gaillard. Richard tried to obtain the manor through negotiation. Walter de Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, was reluctant to sell the manor, as it was one of the diocese's most profitable, and other lands belonging to the diocese had recently been damaged by war. When Philip besieged Aumale in Normandy, Richard grew tired of waiting and seized the manor, although the act was opposed by the Catholic Church. The archbishop issued an interdict against performing church services in the duchy of Normandy; Roger of Howden detailed "unburied bodies of the dead lying in the streets and square of the cities of Normandy". The interdict was still in force when work began on the castle, but Pope Celestine III repealed it in April 1197 after Richard made gifts of land to the archbishop and the diocese of Rouen, including two manors and the prosperous port of Dieppe.
Royal expenditure on castles declined from the levels spent under Henry II, attributed to a concentration of resources on Richard's war with the king of France. However, the work at Château Gaillard was some of the most expensive of its time and cost an estimated £15,000 to £20,000 between 1196 and 1198. This was more than double Richard's spending on castles in England, an estimated £7,000. Unprecedented in its speed of construction, the castle was mostly complete in two years, when most construction on such a scale would have taken the best part of a decade. According to William of Newburgh, in May 1198 Richard and the labourers working on the castle were drenched in a "rain of blood". While some of his advisers thought the rain was an evil omen, Richard was undeterred.
As no master-mason is mentioned in the otherwise detailed records of the castle's construction, military historian Richard Allen Brown has suggested that Richard himself was the overall architect; this is supported by the interest Richard showed in the work through his frequent presence. In his final years, the castle became Richard's favourite residence, and writs and charters were written at Château Gaillard bearing "" (at the Fair Castle of the Rock).
Château Gaillard was ahead of its time, featuring innovations that would be adopted in castle architecture nearly a century later. Allen Brown described Château Gaillard as "one of the finest castles in Europe", and military historian Sir Charles Oman wrote that it was considered "the masterpiece of its time. The reputation of its builder, Cœur de Lion, as a great military engineer might stand firm on this single structure. He was no mere copyist of the models he had seen in the East, but introduced many original details of his own invention into the stronghold".
Determined to resist Philip's designs on contested Angevin lands such as the Vexin and Berry, Richard poured all his military expertise and vast resources into the war on the French King. He organised an alliance against Philip, including Baldwin IX of Flanders, Renaud, Count of Boulogne, and his father-in-law, King Sancho VI of Navarre, who raided Philip's lands from the south. Most importantly, he managed to secure the Welf inheritance in Saxony for his nephew, Henry the Lion's son, who was elected Otto IV of Germany in 1198.
Partly as a result of these and other intrigues, Richard won several victories over Philip. At Fréteval in 1194, just after Richard's return to France from captivity and money-raising in England, Philip fled, leaving his entire archive of financial audits and documents to be captured by Richard. At the Battle of Gisors (sometimes called Courcelles) in 1198, Richard took —"God and my Right"—as his motto (still used by the British monarchy today), echoing his earlier boast to Emperor Henry that his rank acknowledged no superior but God.
Death
In March 1199, Richard was in Limousin suppressing a revolt by Viscount Aimar V of Limoges. Although it was Lent, he "devastated the Viscount's land with fire and sword". He besieged the tiny, virtually unarmed castle of Châlus-Chabrol. Some chroniclers claimed that this was because a local peasant had uncovered a treasure trove of Roman gold.
On 26 March 1199, Richard was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and the wound turned gangrenous. Richard asked to have the crossbowman brought before him; called alternatively Pierre (or Peter) Basile, John Sabroz, Dudo, and Bertrand de Gourdon (from the town of Gourdon) by chroniclers, the man turned out (according to some sources, but not all) to be a boy. He said Richard had killed his father and two brothers, and that he had killed Richard in revenge. He expected to be executed, but as a final act of mercy Richard forgave him, saying "Live on, and by my bounty behold the light of day", before he ordered the boy to be freed and sent away with 100 shillings.
Richard died on 6 April 1199 in the arms of his mother, and thus "ended his earthly day." Because of the nature of Richard's death, it was later referred to as "the Lion by the Ant was slain". According to one chronicler, Richard's last act of chivalry proved fruitless when the infamous mercenary captain Mercadier had the boy flayed alive and hanged as soon as Richard died.
Richard's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy, his entrails in Châlus (where he died), and the rest of his body at the feet of his father at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. In 2012, scientists analysed the remains of Richard's heart and found that it had been embalmed with various substances, including frankincense, a symbolically important substance because it had been present both at the birth and embalming of the Christ.
Henry Sandford, Bishop of Rochester (1226–1235), announced that he had seen a vision of Richard ascending to Heaven in March 1232 (along with Stephen Langton, the former archbishop of Canterbury), the King having presumably spent 33 years in purgatory as expiation for his sins.
Richard produced no legitimate heirs and acknowledged only one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac. He was succeeded by his brother John as king. His French territories, with the exception of Rouen, initially rejected John as a successor, preferring his nephew Arthur. The lack of any direct heirs from Richard was the first step in the dissolution of the Angevin Empire.
Character
Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard's career, deplores that the King was one of "the immense cohort of sinners". He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.
Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself. He was interested in writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament that he wrote during his imprisonment at Dürnstein Castle, Ja nus hons pris, with a version in Old Occitan and a version in Old French.
Speculation regarding sexuality
In the historiography of the second half of the 20th century, much interest was shown in Richard's sexuality, in particular whether there was evidence of homosexuality. The topic had not been raised by Victorian or Edwardian historians, a fact which was itself denounced as a "conspiracy of silence" by John Harvey (1948). The argument primarily drew on accounts of Richard's behaviour, as well as of his confessions and penitences, and of his childless marriage. Richard did have at least one illegitimate child, Philip of Cognac, and there are reports on his sexual relations with local women during his campaigns. Historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality. Harvey argued in favour of his homosexuality but has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham (1994), who argues that Richard was probably heterosexual. Flori (1999) again argued in favour of Richard's homosexuality, based on Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) which, according to Flori, "must have" referred to the sin of sodomy. Flori, however, concedes that contemporary accounts of Richard taking women by force exist, concluding that he probably had sexual relations with both men and women.
Flori and Gillingham nevertheless agree that accounts of bed-sharing do not support the suggestion that Richard had a sexual relationship with King Philip II, as had been suggested by other modern authors.
Legacy
Heraldry
The second Great Seal of Richard I (1198) shows him bearing a shield depicting three lions passant-guardant. This is the first instance of the appearance of this blazon, which later became established as the Royal Arms of England. It is likely, therefore, that Richard introduced this heraldic design. In his earlier Great Seal of 1189, he had used either one lion rampant or two lions rampants combatants, arms which he may have adopted from his father.
Richard is also credited with having originated the English crest of a lion statant (now statant-guardant). The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England national football team, and the team's "Three Lions" anthem), and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England.
Medieval folklore
Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together). Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the King was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic . It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the King's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. An early account of this legend is to be found in Claude Fauchet's Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581).
At some time around the 16th century, tales of Robin Hood started to mention him as a contemporary and supporter of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry, during the misrule of Richard's evil brother John, while Richard was away at the Third Crusade.
Modern reception
Richard's reputation over the years has "fluctuated wildly", according to historian John Gillingham.
While contemporary sources emphasize his stern and unforgiving nature and his excessive cruelty, his image had already been romanticized a few decades after his death, with the new views on Richard depicting him as generous-hearted .
Richard left an indelible imprint in large part because of his military exploits, and his popular image tended to be dominated by the positive qualities of chivalry and military competence. This is reflected in Steven Runciman's final verdict of Richard I: "he was a bad son, a bad husband, and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier" ("History of the Crusades" Vol. III).
Victorian England was divided on Richard: many admired him as a crusader and man of God, erecting an heroic statue to him outside the Houses of Parliament. The late-Victorian scholar William Stubbs, however, thought him "a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man". During his ten years' reign, he was in England for no more than six months, and was totally absent for the last five years. Stubbs argued that:
He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman, but it does not follow that he gave to Normandy, Anjou, or Aquitaine the love or care that he denied to his kingdom. His ambition was that of a mere warrior: he would fight for anything whatever, but he would sell everything that was worth fighting for. The glory that he sought was that of victory rather than conquest.
In World War I, when British troops commanded by General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the British press printed cartoons of Richard looking down from the heavens with the caption reading, "At last my dream has come true". General Allenby protested against his campaign being presented as a latter-day Crusade, stating "The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic importance, there was no religious impulse in this campaign".
Family tree
See also
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England
The Crusade and Death of Richard I
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
See also .
.
.
.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, (London, 1867), available at Gallica.
Roger of Hoveden, , ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, (London, 1868–71), available at Gallica.
.
.
Further reading
Medieval Sourcebook: Guillame de Tyr (William of Tyre): Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea).
.
External links
1157 births
1199 deaths
12th-century English monarchs
12th-century Dukes of Normandy
British monarchs buried abroad
Burials at Fontevraud Abbey
Burials at Rouen Cathedral
Christians of the Third Crusade
Counts of Anjou
Counts of Maine
Counts of Nantes
Counts of Poitiers
Deaths by arrow wounds
Dukes of Aquitaine
Dukes of Gascony
Dukes of Normandy
English folklore
English military personnel killed in action
English people of French descent
English Roman Catholics
House of Anjou
House of Plantagenet
Medieval Cyprus
Medieval legends
Monarchs killed in action
People from Oxford
Rebellious princes
Robin Hood characters
Trouvères
Children of Henry II of England
Norman warriors
Anglo-Normans
| false |
[
"Short Trips: How The Doctor Changed My Life is a Big Finish original anthology edited by Simon Guerrier and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The theme of the collection is how the Doctor affects those he meets.\n\nStories\n\nNotes\n How The Doctor Changed My Life was the result of a competition run by Big Finish Productions to find new writers. The winner of the competition was published in Short Trips: Defining Patterns but it was felt that the standard of entries was so high that a separate anthology could be released - with every story being written by a previously unpublished writer.\n The editor, Simon Guerrier, revealed on his blog that the first paragraph of each story would be posted on the Big Finish Productions Facebook group.\n\nExternal links\n Big Finish Productions - Short Trips: How The Doctor Changed My Life\n A Podcast of Impossible Things - Big Finish Special: How the Doctor Changed My Life\n\nReferences\n\n2008 fiction books\nBig Finish Short Trips",
"The 2020 Liberty Bowl was a college football bowl game played on December 31, 2020, with kickoff at 4:00 p.m. EST (3:00 p.m. local CST) on ESPN. It was the 62nd edition of the Liberty Bowl, and was one of the 2020–21 bowl games concluding the 2020 FBS football season. Sponsored by automotive retailer AutoZone, the game was officially known as the AutoZone Liberty Bowl.\n\nTeams\nBased on conference tie-ins, the bowl was expected to feature teams from the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big 12 Conference. After a matchup of West Virginia of the Big 12 and Tennessee of the SEC was announced on December 20, the Tennessee program had to withdraw on December 21 due to positive COVID-19 testing. Army, who had accepted an invitation to the Independence Bowl before it was canceled due to a lack of available teams, was named as their replacement.\n\nWest Virginia Mountaineers\n\nWest Virginia of the Big 12 entered the Liberty Bowl with a 5–4 record, 4–4 in conference play. The Mountaineers' most recent bowl game was the 2018 Camping World Bowl, and their most recent bowl win was the 2016 Cactus Bowl (January). They had two prior appearances in the Liberty Bowl, losing in the 1964 and the 2014 editions.\n\nArmy Black Knights\n\nArmy, which competed as an independent, entered the Liberty Bowl with a 9–2 record. The Black Knights' most recent bowl game, and bowl win, was the 2018 Armed Forces Bowl. This edition marked Army’s first Liberty Bowl appearance.\n\nGame summary\n\nStatistics\n\nTyhier Tyler tied the Liberty Bowl record for rushing touchdowns, with three.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nGame statistics at statbroadcast.com\n\nLiberty Bowl\nLiberty Bowl\nLiberty Bowl\nLiberty Bowl\nArmy Black Knights football bowl games\nWest Virginia Mountaineers football bowl games"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II"
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
What did Aleksandr do in the war?
| 1 |
What did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn do in the war?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| true |
[
"Aleksandr Alexandrovich Averin (; born January 13, 1981, Moscow) is a Russian political dissident and publicist. He works as journalist.\n\nBiography\n\nPolitical career \nAleksandr Averin was born in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. Averin has been a member of the National Bolshevik Party since 1999. Averin has been Eduard Limonov's official press secretary since 2002. In 2006, Averin co-founded the coalition The Other Russia. In 2006, Aleksandr Averin was one of the organizers of the Dissenters' March in Moscow, during which he was repeatedly detained. In 2009, Averin was one of the organizers of the Strategy-31. Since 2010, Averin has been the spokesperson for the political party The Other Russia.\n\nWar in Donbas \nDuring the War in Donbas Averin served in pro-Russian separatist forces\n\nArrest \nOn 7 April 2018 Aleksandr Averin was arrested by Russian police on his return from Donbas. He was accused of disobedience to border guards and illegal possession of a weapon. He did not plead guilty. On 7 December 2018 Aleksandr Averin was sentenced to 3 years in prison. Political party \"The Other Russia\" recognized Averin as a political prisoner.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nThe Other Russia - Aleksandr Averin's biography\nOfficial blog of Aleksandr Averin in LJ\nOfficial blog of Aleksandr Averin in VK\n\nLiving people\n1981 births\nJournalists from Moscow\nNational Bolshevik Party politicians\nRussian dissidents\nRussian nationalists\nPro-Russian people of the war in Donbas\nRussian prisoners and detainees\nNational Bolsheviks",
"Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky (; – 18 December 1971) was a Soviet poet and writer and chief editor of Novy Mir literary magazine from 1950 to 1954 and 1958 to 1970.\n\nBiography\nTvardovsky was born into a Russian family in Zagorye, in the Smolensky Uyezd of the Smolensk Governorate of the Russian Empire. At the time of his birth, the family lived on a farm that his father had purchased in installments from the Peasant Land Bank. Tvardovsky's father, the son of a landless soldier, was a blacksmith by trade. The farm was situated on poor land, but Tvardovsky's father loved it and was proud of what he had acquired through years of hard labor. He transmitted this love and pride to Aleksandr.\n\nTvardovsky's father was a well-read and intelligent man who often read to Aleksandr and the rest of the family. From an early age, Aleksandr became familiar with the works of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov and others. He began composing poetry while still very young. At age 13, he showed some of his poems to a young teacher who gave him misleading criticism, telling him that poetry should be written as unintelligibly as possible. His first published poem was \"A New Hut\", which was printed in the newspaper, Smolensk Village. After its publication, he collected his poems and showed them to the poet, Mikhail Isakovsky. Aleksandr later acknowledged Isakovsky's influence, saying that he had been the only Soviet poet who had had a beneficial effect on him.\n\nHe left the village school because of poverty after attending only four classes and devoted himself entirely to literature. At the age of 18 he went to Smolensk, but was unable to find literary work. In the winter of 1930, after visiting Moscow, he returned to his native village. During this period, he entered a Pedagogical Institute with the help of a party official, but didn't finish his studies there. He completed his education later at the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature in Moscow. His poem The Land of Muravia was written in 1934–36 and was favorably received by the critics. This poem, along with his other early narrative poem, The Road to Socialism (1931), were products of Tvardovsky's effort to come to terms with collectivization. He was awarded the Stalin Prize for The Land of Muravia. Tvardovsky's father was accused of being a kulak during the period of collectivisation in the Soviet Union. In 1930, after Aleksandr had moved to Smolensk, his father ran away from the family home fearing arrest. In 1931, apart from Aleksandr, the whole family was deported from Zagorye. The family spent several years moving from place to place, splitting up and reuniting, looking for work and safety. Some of them spent time in labour camps. Orlando Figes describes Aleksandr's sense of uneasiness at the way his family had been treated while at the same time fearing for himself, his career and growing creative accomplishments if he was to actively help them. In August 1931, when his father and brother arrived unexpectedly in Smolensk at his work, Aleksandr called the police and his father was arrested. It is highly likely that if Tvardovsky had been seen to help his kulak father (a dangerous and criminal element in the eyes of many), he would have been arrested alongside his father.\nTvardovsky acknowledged the guilt he felt about his father in his late poem, \"By Right of Memory\" (1968).\n\nIn 1939, he participated in the march into Western Belorussia, and also in the Winter War, where he was part of a \"writers' brigade\" composing patriotic verse. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1940 and was a war correspondent during World War II. Early in the war, he began independently working on his poem Vasili Tyorkin. During the post-war years, he served as chief editor of Novy Mir, an influential literary magazine. He became the chief editor of Novy Mir in 1949. He was dismissed from his post in 1954 for publishing officially unacceptable articles by V. Pomerantsev, Fyodor Abramov and M. Shcheglov. He was made chief editor again in July 1958.\n\nTvardovsky fought hard to maintain the traditional independence Novy Mir had, even against official disapproval. During his editorship, the magazine published Ilya Ehrenburg's Thaw in 1954, The Vologda Wedding by Alexander Yashin in 1962, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1962. During those years, the Oktyabr magazine, with the editor in chief Vsevolod Kochetov, was the pro-Soviet, anti-Western and anti-liberal counterpart of Tvardovsky's Novy Mir.\n\nIn 1963, Tvardovsky published a short satirical poem entitled \"Tyorkin in the Other World\", where Tyorkin finds out that hell is a lot like everyday life in the Soviet Union. In 1970, Tvardovsky resigned from Novy Mir, although he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner \"for services to the development of Soviet poetry\" that same year and the State Prize for Literature in the year of his death, 1971, in Moscow.\n\nTvardovsky received the Stalin Prize (1941, 1946, 1947), the USSR State Prize (1971), and the Lenin Prize (1961) for the large poem, Distance After Distance (За далью – даль 1950–60), a collection of poetic impressions and meditations on Russian life first conceived during a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway.\n\nLegacy\n\n \nTvardovsky's most popular poem, Vasili Tyorkin (, also known as A Book About a Soldier, \"Книга про бойца\") (1941–1945), is about an ordinary soldier in the German-Soviet War. Filled with humor, the poem was a hymn to the optimism and resourcefulness of the Russian soldier. It was surprisingly non-politicized, down-to-earth, and intentionally devoid of any picturesque heroism. It was printed chapter by chapter and immediately sent to the front in newspapers and magazines as well as read over the radio by Dmitry Orlov. Tvardovsky was awarded his second Stalin Prize for Vasili Tyorkin.\n\nTvardovsky's World War II-themed poem, \"A House by the Road\", was the basis for Valery Gavrilin's 1984 symphonic suite of the same name.\n\nA minor planet 3261 Tvardovskij discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979 is named after him.\n\nA Russian crewed freighter, registered in the Cook Islands, is named after Tvardovsky.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAleksandr Tvardovsky. Autobiography\nAleksandr Tvardovsky poetry at Stihipoeta\nEncyclopedia of Soviet Writers article on Tvardovsky\nStovemakers, (short story), from Such a Simple Thing and Other Stories, FLPH, Moscow, 1959. \nAleksandr Tvardovsky. Poems\n\n1910 births\n1971 deaths\nPeople from Pochinkovsky District, Smolensk Oblast\nPeople from Smolensky Uyezd\nCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union candidate members\nRussian male poets\nRussian magazine editors\n20th-century Russian poets\n20th-century Russian male writers\nSoviet short story writers\n20th-century Russian short story writers\nSoviet male poets\nRussian male short story writers\nPeople of the Soviet invasion of Poland\nSoviet military personnel of the Winter War\nSoviet military personnel of World War II\nStalin Prize winners\nRecipients of the USSR State Prize\nLenin Prize winners\nRecipients of the Order of the Red Banner\nDeaths from cancer in the Soviet Union\nDeaths from lung cancer\nBurials at Novodevichy Cemetery\nNovy Mir editors"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated."
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
Did he receive any other awards?
| 2 |
Did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn receive any other awards besides being twice decorated?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| true |
[
"Below is a list of awards received by Twins since they were formed in 2001 as a cantopop girl group. They average to receive about 2-3 awards in each Hong Kong music awards. Their major accomplishment is in 2007 when they received the Asia Pacific Most Popular Female Artist Award from Jade Solid Gold Top 10 Awards.\n\nBecause of the Edison Chen photo scandal in 2008, Gillian took a short leave from the group. And thus the group did not record any songs or receive any awards between March 2008 to 2009.\n\nCommercial Radio Hong Kong Ultimate Song Chart Awards\nThe Ultimate Song Chart Awards Presentation (叱咤樂壇流行榜頒獎典禮) is a cantopop award ceremony from one of the famous channel in Commercial Radio Hong Kong known as Ultimate 903 (FM 90.3). Unlike other cantopop award ceremonies, this one is judged based on the popularity of the song/artist on the actual radio show.\n\nGlobal Chinese Music Awards\n\nIFPI Hong Kong Sales Awards\nIFPI Awards is given to artists base on the sales in Hong Kong at the end of the year.\n\nJade Solid Gold Top 10 Awards\nThe Jade Solid Gold Songs Awards Ceremony(十大勁歌金曲頒獎典禮) is held annually in Hong Kong since 1984. The awards are based on Jade Solid Gold show on TVB.\n\nMetro Radio Mandarin Music Awards\n\nMetro Showbiz Hit Awards\nThe Metro Showbiz Hit Awards (新城勁爆頒獎禮) is held in Hong Kong annually by Metro Showbiz radio station. It focus mostly in cantopop music.\n\nRTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards\nThe RTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards Ceremony(十大中文金曲頒獎音樂會) is held annually in Hong Kong since 1978. The awards are determined by Radio and Television Hong Kong based on the work of all Asian artists (mostly cantopop) for the previous year.\n\nSprite Music Awards\nThe Sprite Music Awards Ceremony is an annual event given by Sprite China for work artists performed in previous years; awards received on 2008 are actually for the work and accomplishment for 2007.\n\nReferences\n\nTwins\nCantopop",
"The Drama-Logue Award was an American theater award established in 1977, given by the publishers of Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theater trade publication. Winners were selected by the publication's theater critics, and would receive a certificate at an annual awards ceremony hosted by Drama-Logue founder Bill Bordy. The awards did not require any voting or agreement among critics; each critic could select as many award winners as they wished. As a result, many awards were issued each year. In some years, the number of winners was larger than the seating capacity of the venue where the ceremony was conducted.\n\nThe award categories included Production, Direction, Musical Direction, Choreography, Writing, Performance, Ensemble Performance, Scenic Design, Sound Design, Lighting Design, Costume Design and Hair & Makeup Design.\n\nAcquisition \nIn May 1998, Backstage West bought the Drama-Logue publication, and the two publications merged. The Drama-Logue Awards were subsequently retired and replaced by the Back Stage West Garland Awards.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican theater awards\nAwards established in 1977\nAwards disestablished in 1998"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.",
"Did he receive any other awards?",
"He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction."
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
What else happened while he was in the war?
| 3 |
What else happened while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was in the war besides being awarded Order of the Red Star?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel.
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| true |
[
"\"What Else Is There?\" is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp's second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.\n\nThe single was used in an O2 television advertisement in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia during 2008. It was also used in the 2006 film Cashback and the 2007 film, Meet Bill. Trentemøller's remix of \"What Else is There?\" was featured in an episode of the HBO show Entourage.\n\nThe song was covered by extreme metal band Enslaved as a bonus track for their album E.\n\nThe song was listed as the 375th best song of the 2000s by Pitchfork Media.\n\nOfficial versions\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Album Version) – 5:17\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Radio Edit) – 3:38\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Jacques Lu Cont Radio Mix) – 3:46\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Vocal Version) – 8:03\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Dub Version) – 7:51\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Mix) – 8:25\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Edit) – 4:50\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Remix) (Radio Edit) – 3:06\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Trentemøller Remix) – 7:42\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Vitalic Remix) – 5:14\n\nResponse\nThe single was officially released on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The single had a limited release on 21 November 2005 to promote the upcoming album. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number 32, while on the UK Dance Chart, it reached number one.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was directed by Martin de Thurah. It features Norwegian model Marianne Schröder who is shown lip-syncing Dreijer's voice. Schröder is depicted as a floating woman traveling across stormy landscapes and within empty houses. Dreijer makes a cameo appearance as a woman wearing an Elizabethan ruff while dining alone at a festive table.\n\nMovie spots\n\nThe song is also featured in the movie Meet Bill as characters played by Jessica Alba and Aaron Eckhart smoke marijuana while listening to it. It is also part of the end credits music of the film Cashback.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nRöyksopp songs\nAstralwerks singles\nSongs written by Svein Berge\nSongs written by Torbjørn Brundtland\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Roger Greenaway\nSongs written by Olof Dreijer\nSongs written by Karin Dreijer",
"An Englishman in Auschwitz is a 2001 book written by Leon Greenman, a Holocaust survivor. The book details his experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp.\n\nThe book is a result of the commitment of English-born Greenman to God \"that if he lived, he would let the world know what happened during the war\". In short, the book describes the reminiscences of his days of imprisonment in six concentration camps of the Nazis. Greenman describes the arrival of his family (consisting of himself, his wife, Esther, a Dutchwoman, and their three-year-old son, Barney) at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in these words: The women were separated from the men: Else and Barny were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women...I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me too for she threw me a kiss and held up our child for me to see. What was going through her mind I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end.\n\nReferences\n\n2001 non-fiction books\nPersonal accounts of the Holocaust"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.",
"Did he receive any other awards?",
"He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.",
"What else happened while he was in the war?",
"While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel."
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
What type of crimes did he see?
| 4 |
What type of crimes did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn see?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death.
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| false |
[
"The Judiciary Organization of the Armed Forces is part of the Iranian judiciary. Composed of prosecutor offices and courts-martial, it is the only specialized judicial authority anticipated in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.\n\nLegal Status \nAccording to Principle 172 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, military trials are set up to try crimes relevant to military and disciplinary-specific duties of the members of the army, gendarmerie, Shahrbani (Law Enforcement Force) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. However, their public crimes or the crimes they may commit in the capacity of justice officers, are tried in public courts.\n\nOrganizational structure \nThe prosecutor office and courts-martial are parts of the country's judiciary and are therefore subject to its principles.\n\nMilitary trials comprise courts-martial type 1 and type 2. Courts-martial type 1 adjudicate crimes with heavier punishments in law. In these courts, except for a number of rulings which are definitive by law, other decisions can be re-examined. Rulings of the courts-martial type 1 are contestable and re-examinable in Supreme Court of Iran.\n\nScope of Activity \nCurrently, on the basis of the Islamic Consultative Assembly’s legislation, Expediency Discernment Council and the Leader’s special permission, the Judiciary Organization of the Armed Forces is legitimate to hear the following cases:\n Military and disciplinary-specific crimes, committed by members of the Armed Forces\n Crimes related to the duties of the employees of the Ministry of Intelligence \n Crimes detected while investigating and trying military-specific crimes\n Crimes committed by Iranian prisoners of war and by foreign prisoners of war imprisoned in Iran\n\nHierarchy of Activities \nIn the Judiciary Organization of Armed Forces, hearings are done in two stages: upon receiving a report or a lawsuit from the relevant authorities or individuals, a criminal case starts in the military prosecutors office and initial investigation is conducted by interrogators and prosecutors under the auspices of attorney. Provided that there is enough evidence to certify the offence, the case, after the issuance of an indictment, is sent to the court-martial where after a trial an appropriate verdict is issued.\n\nHearing in courts-martial is carried out according to the criminal procedure and the accused ones can enjoy having lawyers during the entire trial procedure. The Judiciary Organization of the Armed Forces currently has prosecutors office and courts-martial in all the provinces' capitals. These courts are responsible for adjudicating the crimes committed within the jurisdiction of each province.\n\nReferences \n The website of the Judiciary Organization of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran\n\nGovernment agencies of Iran",
"Incarceration is one of the criminal punishments in Ukraine provided for in the Criminal Code of Ukraine.\n\nUse of punishment \nIncarceration is provided for by law for most criminal offenses as a required and/or discretionary punishment. Any person, regardless of status, age, sex, or other category, may be imprisoned.\n\nA sentence of incarceration may be for between 1 and 15 years. If two or more offenses or consecutive sentences are handed down in one case, this period can be increased to 25 years. Depending on the maximum period of incarceration (along with certain amounts of fines after 17 January 2012), crimes may be classified as \"non-grave\" crimes (up to 5 years), grave crimes (up to 10 years), or special grave crimes (more than 10 years years, as well as sentences of life imprisonment). Incarceration cannot be imposed for misdemeanors. Reduced terms of incarceration apply to minors.\n\nThe term of pre-trial detention is 12 months for felonies and 6 months for petty crimes.\n\nTypes of prison colonies \nThere are three types of colonies: minimum security level, medium security level, and maximum security level. Minors serve sentences in educational colonies (). In these colonies, areas of quarantine, diagnostics and distribution, resocialization, and intensified supervision are organised. They differ as to living conditions. Depending on the behaviour of a convicted person, he can be moved from one type of colony to another.\n\nSee also \n Prisons in Ukraine\n\nSources \n\nPenal system in Ukraine\nSentencing (law)"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.",
"Did he receive any other awards?",
"He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.",
"What else happened while he was in the war?",
"While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel.",
"What type of crimes did he see?",
"The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death."
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
Did he say anything else about his experiences?
| 5 |
Did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn say anything else about his experiences besides girls being gang raped and the elderly being robbed?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents.
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| false |
[
"Say Anything may refer to:\n\nFilm and television\n Say Anything..., a 1989 American film by Cameron Crowe\n \"Say Anything\" (BoJack Horseman), a television episode\n\nMusic\n Say Anything (band), an American rock band\n Say Anything (album), a 2009 album by the band\n \"Say Anything\", a 2012 song by Say Anything from Anarchy, My Dear\n \"Say Anything\" (Marianas Trench song), 2006\n \"Say Anything\" (X Japan song), 1991\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Aimee Mann from Whatever, 1993\n \"Say Anything\", a song by the Bouncing Souls from The Bouncing Souls, 1997\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Good Charlotte from The Young and the Hopeless, 2002\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Girl in Red, 2018\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Will Young from Lexicon, 2019\n \"Say Anything (Else)\", a song by Cartel from Chroma, 2005\n\nOther uses\n Say Anything (party game), a 2008 board game published by North Star Games\n \"Say Anything\", a column in YM magazine\n\nSee also\n Say Something (disambiguation)",
"Say Anything is the fourth full-length and self-titled studio album by American rock band Say Anything.\n\nBackground and recording\nIn late 2007, vocalist Max Bemis and drummer Coby Linder worked with Saves the Day vocalist-guitarist Chris Conley and guitarist David Soloway for the side project Two Tongues. In an online chat with fans on March 14, 2008, Max Bemis stated that the band has plans to record a new record called This Is Forever. He said it will be \"about God and how we relate to him.\" AbsolutePunk reported on August 1, 2008, that J Records \"picked up the option for Say Anything's next release.\" In November, alongside the announcement of Two Tongues' debut album, it was revealed that Say Anything was working on their next album, which would be released in 2009. On November 10, Bemis announced that the focus of the fourth album changed and the new record would be self-titled. He noted that the album, which was to be released in 2009, will ask \"what the point of all of it was.\"\n\nThough Bemis has explained that he was very proud of In Defense of the Genre, he described it as being more of an \"homage to sort of a lot of the bands that we liked and, like, a style that we respected.\" He then explained that the new album would be \"more concise and would be a bit more original, I want to say, and sort of pop out like ...Is a Real Boy did.\" He also explained that this CD has both the catchiest and most mature songs they've ever recorded and called it a \"step forward.\"\n\nDuring a concert at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, on April 25, 2009, Max Bemis proclaimed to the crowd that the newest album titled Say Anything was complete, and would be released \"early summer\", after stating that he was married two weeks prior to the event on April 4, 2009.\n\nAccording to Say Anything's In Studio website, on May 21, 2009, Bemis posted a blog entry stating \"I just wanted to let you guys know we’re done recording our new record, entitled \"Say Anything\", and we’re moving into the mixing phase. It should be out this fall. This record is kind of a new start, or at least a new phase in the Say Anything story.\"\n\nRelease\nAfter originally being scheduled to be released through RCA Records on October 13, 2009, it was delayed to November 3. Say Anything frontman Max Bemis posted a blog entry on the band's official site on July 30 announcing its release, and said the album \"literally defines everything about the band we've built so far.\" Max Bemis confirmed through Twitter, on June 21, that the first single from the album will be \"Hate Everyone\". The single was released on August 25. The song impacted radio on September 15. The second single from the album was \"Do Better.\"\n\nOn September 15, 2009 the song \"Property\" from the upcoming album was made available to fans who signed up for the Say Anything official mailing list on the band's official website. The complete album was uploaded to the band's Myspace page on October 29, 2009. Max Bemis stated on his Twitter that the next single from the album would be \"Do Better\" and that Say Anything will debut their live performance of \"Do Better\" on the Angels and Airwaves Spring Tour 2010. \"Do Better\" debuted on April 5, 2010 at The Warfield in San Francisco.\n\nReception\n\nSay Anything was given a metascore of 76 on aggregator Metacritic, from 8 critics it was rated as receiving generally favorable reviews.\n\nA review from Sputnikmusic gave the album a 4.5/5 stars stating: \"Pretty much, Say Anything offers more for fans and opens up the Say Anything sound for new ‘users’ to come and enjoy.\"\n\nThe album debuted at number 25 on the Billboard 200, Say Anything's highest charting record to date.\n\nTrack listing\n\nBonus tracks\n\nDeluxe edition\nDouble Vinyl Gatefold LP\n3-D Poster w/ Glasses\n13 Track CD/MP3 Download\n9 Track Demo CD\nT-Shirt & Badge\n\"Hate Everyone\" Lyrics Sheet\nGuitar Pick Card\nIron-On Decal\n\nSay Anything's Secret Origin\n\nReferences\n\n2009 albums\nSay Anything (band) albums\nRCA Records albums\nAlbums produced by Neal Avron"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.",
"Did he receive any other awards?",
"He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.",
"What else happened while he was in the war?",
"While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel.",
"What type of crimes did he see?",
"The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death.",
"Did he say anything else about his experiences?",
"A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled \"Prussian Nights\" about these incidents."
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
What was the poem about?
| 6 |
What was "Prussian Nights" about?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German,
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| true |
[
"\"The Red Wheelbarrow\" is a poem by American modernist poet and physician William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). The poem was originally published without a title and was designated as \"XXII\" as the twenty-second work in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection which incorporated alternating selections of free verse poetry and prose. It is one of Williams' most frequently anthologized poems, and is considered a prime example of early twentieth-century Imagism.\n\nWriting and publication\n\nThe pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and the precisionist style of Charles Sheeler, an American photographer-painter whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem. The poem represents an early stage in Williams' development as a poet. It focuses on the objective representation of objects, in line with the Imagist philosophy that was ten years old at the time of the poem's publication. The poem is written in a brief, haiku-like free-verse form. With regard to the inspiration for the poem, Williams wrote:\n[\"The Red Wheelbarrow\"] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.\n\nIn 2015, research identified the man who had inspired the work as Thaddeus Lloyd Marshall Sr., who lived a few blocks away from Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey and is buried in Ridgelawn Cemetery in neighboring Clifton.\n\nWhen the poem was originally published in Spring and All, it was simply titled \"XXII\", denoting the poem's order within the book. Referring to the poem as \"The Red Wheelbarrow\" has been frowned upon by some critics, including Neil Easterbrook, who said that such reference gives the text \"a specifically different frame\" from that which Williams originally intended.\n\nPrior to the revelation about Marshall, some critics and literary analysts believed that the poem was written about one of Williams' patients, a little girl who was seriously ill:\nThis poem is reported to have been inspired by a scene in Passaic, New Jersey, where Williams was attending to a sick young girl. Worried that his patient may not survive, Williams looked out the window and saw the wheelbarrow and chickens.\n\nAt the time, I remember being mystified by the poem. However, being properly trained in literary criticism, I wondered what the real meaning of the poem was, what it was really about. ... What is left out of Williams' poem is the fact that when he conceived that image he was sitting at the bedside of a very sick child (Williams was a medical doctor). The story goes that as he sat there, deeply concerned about the child, he looked out the window, saw that image, and penned those words.\n\nI remember well the sneer associated with sentimentality in the university English classes of the early 70s. William Carlos Williams' celebrated red wheelbarrow poem was written after a night at the bedside of a desperately sick child, but to directly mention the child and describe that situation would have been to court pathos. Such a poem would have been fit only for greeting cards or the poor souls who didn't know any better than to like Robert Service.\n\nOf course you can't figure it out by studying the text. The clues aren't there. This poem was meant to be appreciated only by a chosen literary elite, only by those who were educated, those who had learned the back story (Williams was a doctor, and he wrote the poem one morning after having treated a child who was near death. The red wheelbarrow was her toy.) \n\nOrrick Johns’ “Blue Under-Shirts Upon a Line”—first published in “Others” in 1915—may have provided the framework upon which Williams developed “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In a 2010 essay by Mark Hama in College Literature, he “proposes that what Williams likely recognized in his friend Johns’s poem was the framework for a new modern American poetic line.”\n\nCritical reception\nThe poet John Hollander cited \"The Red Wheelbarrow\" as a good example of enjambment to slow down the reader, creating a \"meditative\" poem.\n\nThe editors of Exploring Poetry believe that the meaning of the poem and its form are intimately bound together. They state that \"since the poem is composed of one sentence broken up at various intervals, it is truthful to say that 'so much depends upon' each line of the poem. This is so because the form of the poem is also its meaning.\" This viewpoint is also argued by Henry M. Sayre who compared the poem to the readymade artwork of Marcel Duchamp.\n\nPeter Baker analyzed the poem in terms of theme, writing that \"Williams is saying that perception is necessary to life and that the poem itself can lead to a fuller understanding of one's experience.\"\n\nKenneth Lincoln saw humor in the poem, writing \"perhaps it adds up to no more than a small comic lesson in the necessity of things in themselves.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Critical Essays on \"The Red Wheelbarrow\"\n Haj Ross on the linguistics of the poem\n\nAmerican poems\n1923 poems\nPoetry by William Carlos Williams\nImagism\nModernist poems",
"Nature Poem is a book-length poem written by Tommy Pico, a Native American poet born and raised on Viejas Indian Reservation of Kumeyaay nation. It was published by Tin House in 2017. It was preceded by the publication of IRL (2016), followed by both Junk (2018) and Feed (2019). Nature Poem was written in first-person narration following the character Teebs, a queer “NDN” (American Indian). Teebs is a fictional character, and a development of Pico’s alter-ego and performance persona. Teebs confronts the stereotypes put upon him by white colonialism, such as Indian Americans' association with nature, by refusing to write a nature poem.\n\nDevelopment \nNature Poem was inspired by a line from Pico’s first book-length poem, IRL, where he wrote a poem about disliking nature poems. It was initially intended to be published as a zine.\n\nPico's writing frequently uses text-slang, hashtags, pop-culture references, and humor. Nature Poem was written as a series of individual poems meant to be read in sequence.\n\nOften humorously, Teebs discusses dating, sex, and living as a queer person in the city.\n\nTommy Pico uses the character Teebs to show the life of a queer indigenous Indian.\n\nTommy Pico rewrites about the relationship between himself and nature.\n\nPeople say Tommy Pico was late to the “gay poetry game”, Tommy Pico replies with he was right on time.\n\nTommy Pico calls out the monetization and colonization of the indigenous people where people think it’s appropriate to use indigenous culture for their own sake.\n\nReviews \nThe New York Times Book Review wrote that Nature Poem was covertly political and engaging.\n\nNew York Journal of Books writes that this modern poem explores the tendency of American consumer society to view nature as a \"cosmetic accessory,\" while also exploring the contradiction between Teebs' condemnation of \"empty materialism\" and his simultaneous \"love letter\" to it.\n\nLAMBDA Literary writes that Nature Poem questions what is considered appropriate nature poetry and ensures that while searching for a nature poem within the book, readers are confronted with Teebs' experiences of \"domestic violence, structural poverty, environmental racism, and nuclear disaster.\"\n\nAward winning American Poet, Eileen Myles states, “Mix of hey that’s poetry (uncanny resistance) with hey that’s a text and smashing goals & fulfilling them along the way & saying my parents fulfilled them. Doing it differently being alive & an artist. I love this work. Unpredictable & sweet & strong to continue.”\n\nThe Los Angeles Review of Books wrote of Nature Poem: \"Pico’s work is, in parts, a rose at the altar of the international decolonial movement, imagining what our LGBT and the broader community of marginalized Americans look like if we were to shake ourselves of our bourgeois comforts of the Obama Era and truly resist (purposefully un-hashtagged).\"\n\nNature Poem was a Publisher's Weekly Pick of the Week for May 8, 2017.\n\nAwards \n\n Nature Poem won a 2018 American Book Award.\n Nature Poem was a finalist in the LAMBDA Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2018.\n“ finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Feed (Tin House Books, 2019),”\n\nReferences \n\nAmerican Book Award winners\nPoems\nLGBT poetry\n2010s LGBT literature"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.",
"Did he receive any other awards?",
"He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.",
"What else happened while he was in the war?",
"While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel.",
"What type of crimes did he see?",
"The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death.",
"Did he say anything else about his experiences?",
"A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled \"Prussian Nights\" about these incidents.",
"What was the poem about?",
"In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German,"
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
Does he say anything else about the poem?
| 7 |
Does Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn say anything else about "Prussian Nights" besides memorizing?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| true |
[
"Say Anything may refer to:\n\nFilm and television\n Say Anything..., a 1989 American film by Cameron Crowe\n \"Say Anything\" (BoJack Horseman), a television episode\n\nMusic\n Say Anything (band), an American rock band\n Say Anything (album), a 2009 album by the band\n \"Say Anything\", a 2012 song by Say Anything from Anarchy, My Dear\n \"Say Anything\" (Marianas Trench song), 2006\n \"Say Anything\" (X Japan song), 1991\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Aimee Mann from Whatever, 1993\n \"Say Anything\", a song by the Bouncing Souls from The Bouncing Souls, 1997\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Good Charlotte from The Young and the Hopeless, 2002\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Girl in Red, 2018\n \"Say Anything\", a song by Will Young from Lexicon, 2019\n \"Say Anything (Else)\", a song by Cartel from Chroma, 2005\n\nOther uses\n Say Anything (party game), a 2008 board game published by North Star Games\n \"Say Anything\", a column in YM magazine\n\nSee also\n Say Something (disambiguation)",
"\"Mr Bleaney\" is a poem by British poet Philip Larkin, written in May 1955. It was first published in The Listener on 8 September 1955 and later included in Larkin's 1964 anthology The Whitsun Weddings.\n\nThe speaker in the poem is renting a room and compares his situation to that of its previous occupant, a Mr Bleaney.\n\nLarkin had previously used the surname Bleaney in his first novel Jill in 1946, where Bleaney is named as a classmate of the hero, John Kemp, at \"Huddlesford Grammar School\", somewhere in Lancashire. But the reader is not told his Christian name or indeed anything else about him. There is nothing to indicate that this is the same Bleaney who eventually occupies the room described in Larkin's poem.\n\nStructure\nThe poem comprises seven four-line stanzas with a regular rhyme pattern of ABAB. The last sentence spans two stanzas:\n\nSee also\nList of poems by Philip Larkin\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nText and audio recording of poem\nGlyndŵr University annotated text\n\nPoetry by Philip Larkin\nEnglish poems\nWorks originally published in The Listener (magazine)\n1955 poems"
] |
[
"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn",
"World War II",
"What did Aleksandr do in the war?",
"During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.",
"Did he receive any other awards?",
"He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.",
"What else happened while he was in the war?",
"While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel.",
"What type of crimes did he see?",
"The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death.",
"Did he say anything else about his experiences?",
"A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled \"Prussian Nights\" about these incidents.",
"What was the poem about?",
"In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German,",
"Does he say anything else about the poem?",
"the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg."
] |
C_8513a54057f1450ba623d22bf3486ba9_0
|
Is there anything else interesting?
| 8 |
Is there anything else interesting besides Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's experiences?
|
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
|
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped to death. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" CANNOTANSWER
|
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions,
|
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity and became a firm believer in both atheism and Marxism–Leninism; in his later life, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter.
As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. After he had returned to the Christian faith of his childhood, he pursued writing novels about repressions in the Soviet Union and his experiences. He published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which was an account of Stalinist repressions. Solzhenitsyn's last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963. Following the removal of Khrushchev from power, the Soviet authorities attempted to discourage him from continuing to write. Solzhenitsyn continued to work on further novels and their publication in other countries including Cancer Ward in 1968, August 1914 in 1971, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the publication of which outraged the Soviet authorities. In 1974 Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship and was flown to West Germany. In 1976, he moved with his family to the United States, where he continued to write. In 1990, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored, and four years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008.
He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature", and The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state", and sold tens of millions of copies.
Biography
Early years
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father was of Russian descent and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent. Her father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.
In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944.
As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, by this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.
World War II
During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German artillery batteries and adjusting counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction.
A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.
While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like Ilya Ehrenburg.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'"
Imprisonment
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing derogatory comments in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "Khozyain" ("the boss"), and "Balabos" (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for "master of the house"). He also had talks with the same friend about the need for a new organization to replace the Soviet regime.
He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On 9 May 1945, it was announced that Germany had surrendered and all of Moscow broke out in celebrations with fireworks and searchlights illuminating the sky to celebrate the victory in the Great Patriotic War. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn remembered: "Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours." On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labour camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.
The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009). In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing. While there Solzhenitsyn had a tumor removed. His cancer was not diagnosed at the time.
In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek District of South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children
On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop."
In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison
After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."
In 1960, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candor, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came to an end.
Later years in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to have his novel Cancer Ward legally published in the Soviet Union. This required the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work was ultimately denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations.
After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings, The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.
After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–67, the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of Estonia in a Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile. Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago'''s rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but he survived.
Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."
During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union
In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief Yury Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West
On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. military attaché William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and his Second World War military citations. Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995).
In West Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in . He then moved to Zürich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family". He stayed at the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. He was given an honorary literary degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on 8 June 1978 he gave a commencement address, condemning, among other things, the press, the lack of spirituality and traditional values, and the anthropocentrism of Western culture.
On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.
The KGB also sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew. Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between Pauk and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that the people around him were KGB agents, and deceiving him at every opportunity. Among other things, he continually received envelopes with photographs of car crashes, brain surgery and other disturbing imagery. After the KGB harassment in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his dramatized history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four sections had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.
Despite spending almost two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion.
Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."
In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England."The Cavendish Farewell" in Ericson (2009) pp. 606–07 He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as Rebuilding Russia, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones, translated and released as two works by the University of Notre Dame as part of the Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second, Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020.
Once back in Russia Solzhenitsyn hosted a television talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the Russian Revolution.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, is a pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death
Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.
Views on history and politics
On Christianity, Tsarism, and Russian nationalism
According to William Harrison, Solzhenitsyn was an "arch-reactionary", who argued that the Soviet State "suppressed" traditional Russian and Ukrainian culture, called for the creation of a united Slavic state encompassing Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and who was a fierce opponent of Ukrainian independence. Harrison also alleged that Solzhenitsyn held Pan-Slavist and monarchist views. According to Harrison, "His historical writing is imbued with a hankering after an idealized Tsarist era when, seemingly, everything was rosy. He sought refuge in a dreamy past, where, he believed, a united Slavic state (the Russian empire) built on Orthodox foundations had provided an ideological alternative to western individualistic liberalism."
In his writings and speeches, Solzhenitsyn, however, has sharply criticized the policies of every Tsar from the House of Romanov. A persistent theme in his criticism has been that the Romanovs preferred, like Nicholas I during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign countries while governing badly at home.
Solzhenitsyn has also repeatedly denounced Tsar Alexis of Russia and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow for causing the Great Schism of 1666, which Solzhenitsyn says both divided and weakened the Russian Orthodox Church at a time when unity was desperately needed. Solzhenitsyn also attacked both the Tsar and the Patriarch for using excommunication, Siberian exile, imprisonment, torture, and even burning at the stake against the Old Believers, who rejected the liturgical changes which caused the Schism.
Solzhenitsyn has also argued that the Dechristianization of Russian culture, which he considers most responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, began in 1666, became much worse during the Reign of Tsar Peter the Great, and accelerated into an epidemic during The Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and the Silver Age.
Expanding upon this theme, Solzhenitsyn once declared, "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'"
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, however, Solzhenitsyn commented, "[The Old Believers were] treated amazingly unjustly, because some very insignificant, trifling differences in ritual which were promoted with poor judgment and without much sound basis. Because of these small differences, they were persecuted in very many cruel ways, they were suppressed, they were exiled. From the perspective of historical justice, I sympathise with them and I am on their side, but this in no way ties in with what I have just said about the fact that religion in order to keep up with mankind must adapt its forms toward modern culture. In other words, do I agree with the Old Believers that religion should freeze and not move at all? Not at all!"
When asked by Pearce for his opinions about the division within the Roman Catholic Church over the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of Paul VI, Solzhenitsyn replied, "A question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is, should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic, or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service? I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation, and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this, but alas, I fear that if religion does not allow itself to change, it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come and meet it somewhat."
Surprised to hear Solzhenitsyn, "so often perceived as an arch-traditionalist, apparently coming down on the side of the reformers", Pearce then asked Solzhenitsyn what he thought of the division caused within the Anglican Communion by the decision to ordain female priests.
Solzhenitsyn replied, "Certainly there are many firm boundaries that should not be changed. When I speak of some sort of correlation between the cultural norms of the present, it is really only a small part of the whole thing." Solzhenitsyn then added, "Certainly, I do not believe that women priests is the way to go!"
On Russia and the Jews
OGPU officer Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn identified as "a Turkish Jew born in Constantinople", is represented as having played a major role in the organisation of work in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel was the "nerve of the Archipelago".
In his 1974 essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations", Solzhenitsyn urged "Russian Gentiles" and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism–Leninism and participated in the Red Terror and many other acts of torture and mass murder following the October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn argued that both Russian Gentiles and Jews should be prepared to treat the atrocities committed by Jewish and Gentile Bolsheviks as though they were the acts of their own family members, before their consciences and before God. Solzhenitsyn said that if we deny all responsibility for the crimes of our national kin, "the very concept of a people loses all meaning."
In a review of Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 in The New York Times on 13 November 1985, Jewish American historian Richard Pipes wrote: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews". Award-winning Jewish novelist and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel disagreed and wrote that Solzhenitsyn was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite. In his 1998 book Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn criticized the Russian far-right's obsession with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories.
In 2001, Solzhenitsyn published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). The book triggered renewed accusations of anti-Semitism. In the book, he repeated his call for Russian Gentiles and Jews to share responsibility for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. He also downplayed the number of victims of an 1882 pogrom despite current evidence, and failed to mention the infamous Beilis affair, a 1911 trial in Kiev where a Jew was accused of ritually murdering Christian children. He was also criticized for relying on outdated scholarship, ignoring current western scholarship, and for selectively quoting to strengthen his preconceptions, such as that the Jews were often treated better than non-Jewish Russians during the Soviet Union. Similarities between Two Hundred Years Together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, have led to the inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself explained that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him by the KGB, and then carefully edited to appear anti-Semitic, before being published, forty years before, without his consent.Cathy Young: Reply to Daniel J. Mahoney in Reason Magazine, August–September 2004. According to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.
Criticism of communism
Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet police state, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extreme style of the Soviet Glavlit, that political prisoners typically were not forced into labor camps, and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of prisoners and Exiles following the Bolshevik Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.
Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939", a reference to the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans, which was not a common view at that time among American diplomats. For Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn was "just about a fascist." According to Elisa Kriza, Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Franco's dictatorship and Francoist Spain because it was a Christian one, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, Franco's Spain is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response to the evil of Bolshevism." According to Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fell out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the state."
In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
On post-Soviet Russia
In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian democracy, while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism). He also urged for local self-government similar to what he had seen in New England town meetings and in the cantons of Switzerland. He also expressed concern for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union.
In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he felt that the socioeconomic theories of E.F. Schumacher were, "the key to society rediscovering its sanity". He replied, "I do believe that it would be the key, but I don't think this will happen, because people succumb to fashion, and they suffer from inertia and it is hard to them to come round to a different point of view."
Solzhenitsyn refused to accept Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998. Solzhenitsyn later said: "In 1998, it was the country's low point, with people in misery; ... Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits." In a 2003 interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn said: "We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed."
In a 2007 interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn expressed disappointment that the "conflation of 'Soviet' and 'Russian'", against which he spoke so often in the 1970s, had not passed away in the West, in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics. He commented, "The elder political generation in communist countries is not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow [as] a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist. Nevertheless, I dare [to] hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history."
On 20 September 2000, Solzhenitsyn met newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Solzhenitsyn praised Putin, saying Russia was rediscovering what it meant to be Russian. Solzhenitsyn also praised the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as a "nice young man" who was capable of taking on the challenges Russia was facing.
Criticism of the West
Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West.
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and control of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.
Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States "Dechristianized" and mired in boorish consumerism. The American people, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were also suffering from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He also condemned the 1960s counterculture for forcing the United States federal government to accept a "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War.
In a reference to the Communist governments in Southeast Asia's use of re-education camps, politicide, human rights abuses, and genocide following the Fall of Saigon, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He also accused the Western news media of left-wing bias, of violating the privacy of celebrities, and of filling up the "immortal souls" of their readers with celebrity gossip and other "vain talk". He also said that the West erred in thinking that the whole world should embrace this as model. While faulting Soviet society for rejecting basic human rights and the rule of law, he also critiqued the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities." Solzhenitsyn also argued that the West erred in "denying [Russian culture's] autonomous character and therefore never understood it".
Solzhenitsyn criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and accused the United States of the "occupation" of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Solzhenitsyn was critical of NATO's eastward expansion towards Russia's borders. In 2006, Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visible because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In a 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."
On the Holodomor
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975 in which he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system was responsible for the Holodomor: "It was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Solzhenitsyn added, "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!"
Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history.
Legacy
The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center in Worcester, Massachusetts promotes the author and hosts the official English-language website dedicated to him.
In popular media
Solzhenitsyn is the subject of the song "Mother Russia" by British progressive rock group Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn's philosophy plays a key role in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where a character previously kept ignorant and subservient is illegally educated, and is shown reading and quoting his works.
In a 2001 episode of the NBC drama The West Wing titled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler sarcastically refers to the leader of a WTO protest as Solzhenitsyn.
Television documentaries on Solzhenitsyn
In October 1983, French literary journalist Bernard Pivot made an hour-long television interview with Solzhenitsyn at his rural home in Vermont, US. Solzhenitsyn discussed his writing, the evolution of his language and style, his family and his outlook on the future—and stated his wish to return to Russia in his lifetime, not just to see his books eventually printed there.Apostrophes: Alexandre Soljenitsyne répond à Bernard Pivot | Archive INA Ina Talk Shows Earlier the same year, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on separate occasions by two British journalists, Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov made a four-part television documentary, Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). The documentary was shot in Solzhenitsyn's home depicting his everyday life and his reflections on Russian history and literature.
In December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K broadcast the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag (The Secret History of the Gulag Archipelago) made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya "Arkhipelaga Gulag" (Тайная история "Архипелага ГУЛАГ"). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
Published works and speeches
Also known as The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR. Centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
(3 vols.), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union.
.
.
; separate publication of chapters on Vladimir Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. The first of them was later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914 (though it had been written at the same time as the original version of the novel) and the rest in November 1916 and March 1917.
on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.
See also
More literature covering the Gulag system
Ivan Bunin
Czesław Miłosz
Đoàn Văn Toại
Lev Kopelev
List of refugees
Wei Jingsheng
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes
References
Sources
Kriza, Elisa (2014) Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist? A Study of the Western Reception of his Literary Writings, Historical Interpretations, and Political Ideas. Stuttgart: Ibidem Press.
Further reading
Biographies
Ostrovsky Alexander (2004). Солженицын: прощание с мифом (Solzhenitsyn: Farewell to the myth) – Moscow: «Yauza», Presscom.
Reference works
.
; Prof. Vittorio Strada, Dott. Julija Dobrovol'skaja.
Anatoly Livry, « Soljénitsyne et la République régicide », Les Lettres et Les Arts, Cahiers suisses de critique littéraire et artistiques, Association de la revue Les Lettres et les Arts, Suisse, Vicques, 2011, pp. 70–72. http://anatoly-livry.e-monsite.com/medias/files/soljenitsine-livry-1.pdf
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
External links
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Negative Analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Stalin Society''
.
Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death', 23 July 2007
As delivered text and video of Harvard Commencement Address at AmericanRhetoric.com
The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005
1918 births
2008 deaths
20th-century historians
20th-century male writers
20th-century non-fiction writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Burials at Donskoy Monastery
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Christian novelists
Christian writers
Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Eastern Orthodox philosophers
Full Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Gulag detainees
Inmates of Lefortovo Prison
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Nobel laureates in Literature
People forcibly stripped of Soviet citizenship
People from Cavendish, Vermont
People from Kislovodsk
People of the Cold War
Prison writings
Recipients of the Order of the Red Star
Rostov State University alumni
Russian anti-communists
Russian exiles
Russian historians
Russian humanitarians
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Russian monarchists
Russian nationalists
Russian Nobel laureates
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia
Russian Orthodox Christians from the Soviet Union
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Russian prisoners and detainees
Russian writers of Ukrainian descent
Sharashka inmates
Soviet Army officers
Soviet dissidents
Soviet emigrants to Germany
Soviet emigrants to Switzerland
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Soviet expellees
Soviet male writers
Soviet military personnel of World War II
Soviet Nobel laureates
Soviet non-fiction writers
Soviet novelists
Soviet prisoners and detainees
Soviet psychiatric abuse whistleblowers
Soviet rehabilitations
Soviet short story writers
Soviet whistleblowers
Stalinism-era scholars and writers
State Prize of the Russian Federation laureates
Stateless people
Television talk show hosts
Templeton Prize laureates
World War II poets
Male non-fiction writers
| true |
[
"\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" is a 2010 science fiction/magical realism short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in Realms of Fantasy.\n\nPlot summary\nA scientist creates a tiny man. The tiny man is initially very popular, but then draws the hatred of the world, and so the tiny man must flee, together with the scientist (who is now likewise hated, for having created the tiny man).\n\nReception\n\"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" won the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, tied with Kij Johnson's \"Ponies\". It was Ellison's final Nebula nomination and win, of his record-setting eight nominations and three wins.\n\nTor.com calls the story \"deceptively simple\", with \"execution (that) is flawless\" and a \"Geppetto-like\" narrator, while Publishers Weekly describes it as \"memorably depict(ing) humanity's smallness of spirit\". The SF Site, however, felt it was \"contrived and less than profound\".\n\nNick Mamatas compared \"How Interesting: A Tiny Man\" negatively to Ellison's other Nebula-winning short stories, and stated that the story's two mutually exclusive endings (in one, the tiny man is killed; in the other, he becomes God) are evocative of the process of writing short stories. Ben Peek considered it to be \"more allegory than (...) anything else\", and interpreted it as being about how the media \"give(s) everyone a voice\", and also about how Ellison was treated by science fiction fandom.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nAudio version of ''How Interesting: A Tiny Man, at StarShipSofa\nHow Interesting: A Tiny Man, at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database\n\nNebula Award for Best Short Story-winning works\nShort stories by Harlan Ellison",
"In baseball, a fair ball is a batted ball that entitles the batter to attempt to reach first base. By contrast, a foul ball is a batted ball that does not entitle the batter to attempt to reach first base. Whether a batted ball is fair or foul is determined by the location of the ball at the appropriate reference point, as follows:\n\n if the ball leaves the playing field without touching anything, the point where the ball leaves the field;\n else, if the ball first lands past first or third base without touching anything, the point where the ball lands;\n else, if the ball rolls or bounces past first or third base without touching anything other than the ground, the point where the ball passes the base;\n else, if the ball touches anything other than the ground (such as an umpire, a player, or any equipment left on the field) before any of the above happens, the point of such touching;\n else (the ball comes to a rest before reaching first or third base), the point where the ball comes to a rest.\n\nIf any part of the ball is on or above fair territory at the appropriate reference point, it is fair; else it is foul. Fair territory or fair ground is defined as the area of the playing field between the two foul lines, and includes the foul lines themselves and the foul poles. However, certain exceptions exist:\n\n A ball that touches first, second, or third base is always fair.\n Under Rule 5.09(a)(7)-(8), if a batted ball touches the batter or his bat while the batter is in the batter's box and not intentionally interfering with the course of the ball, the ball is foul.\n A ball that hits the foul pole without first having touched anything else off the bat is fair.\n Ground rules may provide whether a ball hitting specific objects (e.g. roof, overhead speaker) is fair or foul.\n\nOn a fair ball, the batter attempts to reach first base or any subsequent base, runners attempt to advance and fielders try to record outs. A fair ball is considered a live ball until the ball becomes dead by leaving the field or any other method.\n\nReferences\n\nBaseball rules"
] |
[
"Danny Glover",
"Political activism"
] |
C_e2c9ab9fcb7341b0b6869c12931cafe5_0
|
When did Glover's political activities begin?
| 1 |
When did Danny Glover's political activities begin?
|
Danny Glover
|
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics." Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election. On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?" Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Danny Lebern Glover (; born July 22, 1946) is an American actor, film director, and political activist. He is widely known for his lead role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film series. He also had leading roles in his films included The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, Predator 2, Angels in the Outfield, and Operation Dumbo Drop. Glover has prominent supporting roles in Silverado, Witness, A Rage in Harlem, Dreamgirls, Shooter, Death at a Funeral, Beyond the Lights, Sorry to Bother You, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Dead Don't Die, Lonesome Dove and Jumanji: The Next Level. He is also an active supporter of various political causes.
In 2021, it was announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would bestow the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Glover for his "decades-long advocacy for justice and human rights [which] reflects his dedication to recognizing our shared humanity on and off the screen".
Early life
Glover was born in San Francisco, the son of Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover. His parents, both postal workers, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to advance equal rights. Glover's mother, daughter of a midwife, was born in Louisville, Georgia and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. His father was a World War II veteran. He graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco.
As an adolescent and a young adult, Glover suffered from epilepsy but has not suffered a seizure since age 35. He attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s but did not graduate. SFSU later awarded him the Presidential Medal of San Francisco State University for his service to education. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
Career
Glover originally worked in city administration working on community development before transitioning to theater. He has said:
I didn't think it was a difficult transition. Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings—all within that realm of the capacity it represents. It may have been a leap of faith for me, given not only my learning disability (dyslexia) but also the fact that I felt awkward. I felt all the things that someone that's 6′3″ or 6′4″ feels and with my own diminished expectations of who I could be [and] would feel. Whether it's art, acting or theater that I've devoted myself to I put more passion and more energy into it.
His first theater involvement was with the American Conservatory Theater, a regional training program in San Francisco. Glover also trained with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab in San Francisco. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Glover credited Jean Shelton for much of his development as an actor. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Glover resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor. Glover then moved to Los Angeles for more opportunities in acting, where he would later go on to co-found the Robey Theatre Company with actor Ben Guillory in honor of the actor and concert singer Paul Robeson in Los Angeles in 1994.
Glover has had a variety of film, stage, and television roles, and is best known for playing Los Angeles police Sergeant Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series of action films, starring alongside Mel Gibson, and Joe Pesci. Later he once again starred with Gary Busey in the blockbuster Predator 2. He also starred as the husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in the celebrated literary adaptation The Color Purple, and as Lieutenant James McFee in the film Witness. In 1994 he made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override.
Also in 1994, Glover and actor Ben Guillory founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, focusing on theatre by and about black people. During his career, he has made several cameos, appearing, for example, in the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl" of 1987. Glover earned top billing for the first time in Predator 2, the sequel to the science fiction action film Predator. That same year he starred in Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
In common with Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have played Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe, Glover played the role in the episode "Red Wind" of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels. In 1997, under his former production company banner Carrie Films, Glover executive produced numerous films of first time directors including Pamm Malveaux's neo-noir short film Final Act starring Joe Morton, which aired on the Independent Film Channel. In addition, Glover has been a voice actor in many children's movies. Glover was featured in the popular 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson.
In 2004, he appeared in the low-budget horror film Saw as Detective David Tapp. In 2005, Glover and Joslyn Barnes announced plans to make No FEAR, a film about Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's experience. Coleman-Adebayo won a 2000 jury trial against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The jury found the EPA guilty of violating the civil rights of Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race, sex, color, and a hostile work environment, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman-Adebayo was terminated shortly after she revealed the environmental and human disaster taking place in the Brits, South Africa, vanadium mines. Her experience inspired the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No-FEAR Act). the No Fear title has not appeared but The Marsha Coleman-Adebayo Story was announced as the next major project of No Fear Media Productions.
Glover portrayed David Keaton in the film The Exonerated—a real-life story of Keaton's experience of being arrested, jailed, and then freed from death row.
In 2009, Glover performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Glover played President Wilson, the President of the United States in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in theaters November 13, 2009. In 2010, Glover participated in a Spanish film called I Want to Be a Soldier. In 2012, he starred in the film Donovan's Echo.
Glover co-starred in the science fiction comedy film Sorry to Bother You, which was released in theaters on July 6, 2018.
Planned directorial debut
Glover sought to make a film biography of Toussaint Louverture for his directorial debut. In May 2006, the film had included cast members Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Guenveur Smith, Mos Def, Isaach de Bankolé, and Richard Bohringer. Production, estimated to cost $30 million, was planned to begin in Poland, filming from late 2006 into early 2007. In May 2007, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez contributed $18 million to fund the production of Toussaint for Glover, who was a prominent U.S. supporter of Chávez. The contribution annoyed some Venezuelan filmmakers, who said the money could have funded other homegrown films and that Glover's film was not even about Venezuela. In April 2008, the Venezuelan National Assembly authorized an additional $9,840,505 for Glover's film, which is still in planning. In 2015, Glover gave an update on the Toussaint project, stating, "The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me."
Public appearances
Glover appeared at London Film and Comic Con 2013 at Earls Court 2 over 2.5 days during Friday 5th to Sunday, July 7. He participated in a panel discussion in McComb, Mississippi on July 16, 2015. The event, co-sponsored by The Gloster Project and Jubilee Performing Arts Center, included noted authors Terry McMillan and Quincy Troupe.
On January 30, 2015, Glover was the Keynote Speaker and 2015 Honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Glover used his career and personal story to speak on the topic "Creativity and Democracy: Social Change through the Arts". At the University of the Virgin Islands, Glover gave a speech that encouraged the graduates in their upcoming journey.
It was announced in July 2018 that Glover will be the featured guest at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State.
Personal life
Glover married Asake Bomani in 1975 and they have a daughter, Mandisa, born in 1976. Glover and Bomani divorced in 2000. Glover married Eliane Cavalleiro in 2009.
Glover purchased a house in Dunthorpe, Oregon, in 1999. As of 2011, he no longer lives in Oregon.
On April 16, 2010, Glover was arrested in Maryland during a protest by SEIU workers for Sodexo's alleged unfair and illegal treatment of workers. He was given a citation and later released. The Associated Press reports "Glover and others stepped past yellow police tape and were asked to step back three times at Sodexo headquarters. When they refused, officers arrested them."
Glover is a Babalawo.
Activism
Civil rights activism
While attending San Francisco State University (SFSU), Glover was a member of the Black Students' Union, which, along with the Third World Liberation Front and the American Federation of Teachers, collaborated in a five-month student-led strike to establish a Department of Black Studies. The strike was the longest student walkout in U.S. history. It helped create not only the first Department of Black Studies but also the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States.
Hari Dillon, current president of the Vanguard Public Foundation, was a fellow striker at SFSU. Glover later co-chaired Vanguard's board. He is also a board member of the Algebra Project, the Black AIDS Institute, Walden House and Cheryl Byron's Something Positive Dance Group. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly after being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during a protest over Sudan's humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
In 1999, he used his leverage as a former San Francisco cab driver to raise awareness about African Americans being passed over for white passengers. In response, Rudolph Giuliani launched Operation Refusal, which suspended the licenses of cab drivers who favored white passengers over black ones.
Glover's long history of union activism includes support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, and numerous service unions. In March 2010, Glover supported 375 Union workers in Ohio by calling upon all actors at the 2010 Academy Awards to boycott Hugo Boss suits following announcement of Hugo Boss's decision to close a manufacturing plant in Ohio after a proposed pay decrease from $13 to $8.30 an hour was rejected by the Workers United Union.
On November 1, 2011, Glover spoke to the crowd at Occupy Oakland on the day before the Oakland General Strike where thousands of protestors shut down the Port of Oakland.
Political activism
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In February 2019, Glover again endorsed Sanders for US president in 2020.
In 2017, he co-authored a petition along with Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Nancy Fraser, Oliver Stone and Eve Ensler, urging French citizens to vote for candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 presidential election.
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics."
Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election.
On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?"
Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker.
International
Africa
Glover is an active board member of the TransAfrica Forum. On April 6, 2009, Glover was given a chieftaincy title in Imo State, Nigeria. His title, "Enyioma of Nkwerre", means A Good Friend in the language of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.
Brazil
In 2018, Glover, as the UN Goodwill Ambassador, met with Lula to express solidarity and support for his presidential candidacy. During a trip to Brazil, he also met with the family of Marielle Franco, the City Council member and LGBT activist murdered in Rio de Janeiro.
Caribbean and Haiti
On January 13, 2010, Glover compared the scale and devastation of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the predicament other island nations may face as a result of the failed Copenhagen summit the previous year. Glover said: "the threat of what happens to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations ... they're all in peril because of global warming ... because of climate change ... when we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens". In the same statement, he called for a new form of international partnership with Haiti and other Caribbean nations and praised Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, for already accepting this partnership.
Iraq War
Danny Glover had been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War before the war began in March 2003. In February 2003, he was one of the featured speakers at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco where other notable speakers included names such as author Alice Walker, singer Joan Baez, United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.
Glover was a signatory to the April 2003 anti-war letter "To the Conscience of the World" that criticized the unilateral American invasion of Iraq that led to "massive loss of civilian life" and "devastation of one of the cultural patrimonies of humanity".
During an anti-war demonstration in Downtown Oakland in March 2003, Glover praised the community leaders for their anti-war efforts saying that "They're on the front lines because they are trying to make a better America. ... The world has come together and said 'no' to this war – and we must stand with them."
Venezuela
In January 2006, Harry Belafonte led a delegation of activists, including Glover, activist/professor Cornel West, and activist/Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Founder and Executive Director Daniel NANE Alejandrez in a meeting with President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez. In 2006, Glover had begun working on a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led the 18th century revolt in Haiti and, it was reported, that Chavez supported the film, "hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression." In 2007, Glover agreed with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that the Touissant Louverture film would be financed by Venezuela. On May 19, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela approved giving Glover $18,000,000 for the film. The following year, on April 9, 2008, the National Assembly of Venezuela, at the request of the Chávez, approved another $9,000,000 to be handed to Glover in order to "continue" the filming of the film about Touissant. Surprisingly, in an interview dated January 5, 2015, published in Filmmaker magazine, Glover says, “The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me”. As of 2015, the film had not been made.
Glover was also a board member of TeleSUR, a media network primarily funded by the Venezuelan government. During the beginning of the 2014 Venezuela Protests, Glover shared his support to Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, calling members of his government "the stewards" of Venezuela's democracy. Glover also told Venezuelan government supporters to go fight for the sovereignty of Maduro's government. Through the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Glover continued to show his support for the Bolivarian government and President Maduro's administration.
Israel
On September 2, 2009, Glover signed an open letter of objection to the inclusion of a series of films intended to showcase Tel Aviv—without the participation of Palestinian filmmakers, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Music
Glover has become an active member of board of directors of The Jazz Foundation of America. He became involved with The Jazz Foundation in 2005, and has been a featured host for their annual benefit A Great Night in Harlem for several years, as well appearing as a celebrity MC at other events for the foundation. In 2006, Britain's leading African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi appointed Glover as one of its three Patrons, joining Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jocelyn Jee Esien opening the organization's tenth-anniversary celebrations (February 2, 2008) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
Filmography
Awards and honours
In 2010, Glover delivered the Commencement Address and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Utah State University. The same year, Starr King School for the Ministry awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters in absentia. He was awarded the doctorate specifically for his long history of activism, including support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, The Algebra Project, The Black AIDS Institute, as well as his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Haiti earthquake victims, literacy and civil rights and his fight against unjust labor practices.
He was also the recipient of a tribute paid by the Deauville American Film Festival in France on September 7, 2011.
Glover was awarded the Cuban National Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Council of State on December 29, 2016 in a ceremony in Havana for his solidarity with the Cuban 5 during their time of incarceration in the United States.
See also
List of peace activists
References
External links
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
Activists from California
African-American activists
African-American film directors
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American television producers
American anti-war activists
American civil rights activists
American Conservatory Theater alumni
American film producers
American humanitarians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
American political activists
Audiobook narrators
Center for Economic and Policy Research
City College of San Francisco alumni
Film directors from San Francisco
Film producers from California
Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Male actors from California
Male actors from Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
People from Dunthorpe, Oregon
People with dyslexia
People with epilepsy
San Francisco State University alumni
Television producers from California
Television producers from Oregon
| false |
[
"Edward Auchmuty Glover ( – 17 March 1862) was an Irish Independent Conservative politician and barrister.\n\nThe eldest son of James Glover and Ellen Power, Glover was a practising barrister and a Justice of the Peace.\n\nAlthough he contested the 1852 general election as an Independent Conservative, Glover was only elected an Independent Conservative MP for Beverley at the 1857 general election. His political views were, however, more complex, as between the two elections he had contested at several places, \"professing any political creed that might happen to favour his success\". Indeed, while he contested Canterbury as a Radical at a by-election in 1854, when he contested Beverley again in 1857, he stood as a Conservative despite losing the support of the local party. He then held the seat for just a few months.\n\nIn August 1857, Glover was unseated after an Election Petition Committee found that he did not meet the required property qualification–owning property worth £300 a year for a borough seat–at the time of his election, meaning he was not entitled to be elected an MP. However, he had previously declared he met the qualification requirements—these properties he had no interest in.\n\nAfter his case was referred to the Attorney-General, Glover was arrested on 23 December 1857, and he was later found guilty, by the Old Bailey of making a false declaration regarding this qualification. In April 1858, he was sentenced to four months in Newgate Prison, and transferred to the Queen's Bench Prison. The property qualification was later that year abolished.\n\nGlover again contested the seat at the 1859 general election, as an independent candidate, but was unsuccessful, ending votes last in the poll.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nIndependent members of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom\nMembers of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for English constituencies\nUK MPs 1857–1859\n1862 deaths",
"Juleanna R. Glover (born 27 September 1969) is an American corporate public affairs consultant, entrepreneur, former Republican lobbyist and political strategist. For her lobbyist career, Glover is widely considered one of the most powerful women in Washington. As a corporate consultant, she was called the mogul whisperer by The New York Times, having been a spokesperson to James Murdoch and an advisor to Elon Musk. She is founder and CEO of Ridgely Walsh, a public and governmental affairs agency that advises Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Snap, Oracle, eBay, First Solar, Uber, and SpaceX.\n\nEarly career\nGlover received her B.A. from Marymount University in 1991 and M.P.A. from George Mason University in 1993. Glover also studied at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.\n\nGlover started working for Senator John Ashcroft (R-Missouri) in 1996 when he was a freshman senator and helped him explore a bid for the 2000 presidential election. Ashcroft chose not to pursue a run for president, so Glover became press secretary for businessman Steve Forbes, whose campaign ended prior to the Republican Convention.\n\nGlover also worked for Bill Kristol, Vice President Dan Quayle, former Senator and Energy Secretary Spence Abraham, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. Glover's campaign experience also includes roles in the Jesse Helms for North Carolina campaign, and the Rudolph W. Giuliani U.S. Senate exploratory committee, where she worked in the months following her first child's birth.\n\nGlover also worked as the Publicity Director for The Weekly Standard; and as Legislative Director for the Project for the Republican Future.\n\nWhite House Service\nMs. Glover served as senior staff for President George W. Bush and as Press Secretary for Vice President Dick Cheney. Glover also served as the registered government affairs advisor for Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaidaie. She is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.\n\nAfter leaving the White House, Glover was a Resident Fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics in 2002 and has lectured on the future of the Republican Party at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.\n\nPrivate Sector \nGlover has worked as a public affairs consultant since leaving the White House in 2002. Glover was a Director at Clark & Weinstock, one of the top public and government affairs firms in the country. She then co-founded the Ashcroft Group, LLC along with former U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft.\n\nIn 2007, Glover was a senior advisor in Senator John McCain's 2008 bid for the White House, traveling with him throughout the primary season.\n\nIn 2015 and 2021, Washingtonian magazine listed Glover as one of Washington's most powerful women, as did Elle in 2012. In 2011, The New York Times described Glover as the \"consummate political insider\", and in 2012, Bloomberg News described in her profile: \"[S]he brings Washington power players together in a way others can’t match. If you’re looking for the right introduction in D.C., you need to know Juleanna Glover.\"\n\nIn 2013, Glover was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage via the Hollingsworth v. Perry case. Also that year, Ms. Glover became Managing Director of Teneo Intelligence. In accordance with Teneo's policy of not engaging in lobbying activity, Glover fully deregistered as a lobbyist prior to joining.\n\nIn early 2015, Glover transitioned to a senior advisor at Teneo Holdings and began work at her new firm, The Office of Juleanna Glover, with a full transition in January 2016.\n\nIn May 2018, leaked notes written by Paul Manafort indicated that Glover had been mentioned at the June 2016 Trump Tower.\n\nIn 2019, she founded Ridgely Walsh, a public affairs firm in DC.\n\nGlover serves on the board of directors for several organizations, including: FREOPP, Take Back Our Republic, the Climate Leadership Council, and Biden Institute. She also serves on the Membership Committee for The Economic Club of Washington, DC.\n\nGlover is a regular public policy commentator on cable news shows, including Squawk Box on CNBC, Fox & Friends on Fox News, and Martin Bashir on MSNBC. Her opinion pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Forbes, and The National Review, among others.\n\nPersonal life \nGlover has four children. Formerly married to Jeffrey Weiss, she was divorced in 2009.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNew York Times feature on Ms. Glover\nBloomberg feature on Ms. Glover\nPolitico feature on Ms. Glover\nLean In feature on Ms. Glover\n\nLiving people\nPlace of birth missing (living people)\nPaul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies alumni\nGeorge Mason University alumni\n1969 births"
] |
[
"Danny Glover",
"Political activism",
"When did Glover's political activities begin?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_e2c9ab9fcb7341b0b6869c12931cafe5_0
|
What was one of his political activities?
| 2 |
What was one of Danny Glover political activities?
|
Danny Glover
|
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics." Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election. On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?" Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker. CANNOTANSWER
|
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling
|
Danny Lebern Glover (; born July 22, 1946) is an American actor, film director, and political activist. He is widely known for his lead role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film series. He also had leading roles in his films included The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, Predator 2, Angels in the Outfield, and Operation Dumbo Drop. Glover has prominent supporting roles in Silverado, Witness, A Rage in Harlem, Dreamgirls, Shooter, Death at a Funeral, Beyond the Lights, Sorry to Bother You, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Dead Don't Die, Lonesome Dove and Jumanji: The Next Level. He is also an active supporter of various political causes.
In 2021, it was announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would bestow the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Glover for his "decades-long advocacy for justice and human rights [which] reflects his dedication to recognizing our shared humanity on and off the screen".
Early life
Glover was born in San Francisco, the son of Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover. His parents, both postal workers, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to advance equal rights. Glover's mother, daughter of a midwife, was born in Louisville, Georgia and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. His father was a World War II veteran. He graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco.
As an adolescent and a young adult, Glover suffered from epilepsy but has not suffered a seizure since age 35. He attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s but did not graduate. SFSU later awarded him the Presidential Medal of San Francisco State University for his service to education. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
Career
Glover originally worked in city administration working on community development before transitioning to theater. He has said:
I didn't think it was a difficult transition. Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings—all within that realm of the capacity it represents. It may have been a leap of faith for me, given not only my learning disability (dyslexia) but also the fact that I felt awkward. I felt all the things that someone that's 6′3″ or 6′4″ feels and with my own diminished expectations of who I could be [and] would feel. Whether it's art, acting or theater that I've devoted myself to I put more passion and more energy into it.
His first theater involvement was with the American Conservatory Theater, a regional training program in San Francisco. Glover also trained with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab in San Francisco. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Glover credited Jean Shelton for much of his development as an actor. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Glover resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor. Glover then moved to Los Angeles for more opportunities in acting, where he would later go on to co-found the Robey Theatre Company with actor Ben Guillory in honor of the actor and concert singer Paul Robeson in Los Angeles in 1994.
Glover has had a variety of film, stage, and television roles, and is best known for playing Los Angeles police Sergeant Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series of action films, starring alongside Mel Gibson, and Joe Pesci. Later he once again starred with Gary Busey in the blockbuster Predator 2. He also starred as the husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in the celebrated literary adaptation The Color Purple, and as Lieutenant James McFee in the film Witness. In 1994 he made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override.
Also in 1994, Glover and actor Ben Guillory founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, focusing on theatre by and about black people. During his career, he has made several cameos, appearing, for example, in the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl" of 1987. Glover earned top billing for the first time in Predator 2, the sequel to the science fiction action film Predator. That same year he starred in Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
In common with Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have played Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe, Glover played the role in the episode "Red Wind" of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels. In 1997, under his former production company banner Carrie Films, Glover executive produced numerous films of first time directors including Pamm Malveaux's neo-noir short film Final Act starring Joe Morton, which aired on the Independent Film Channel. In addition, Glover has been a voice actor in many children's movies. Glover was featured in the popular 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson.
In 2004, he appeared in the low-budget horror film Saw as Detective David Tapp. In 2005, Glover and Joslyn Barnes announced plans to make No FEAR, a film about Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's experience. Coleman-Adebayo won a 2000 jury trial against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The jury found the EPA guilty of violating the civil rights of Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race, sex, color, and a hostile work environment, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman-Adebayo was terminated shortly after she revealed the environmental and human disaster taking place in the Brits, South Africa, vanadium mines. Her experience inspired the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No-FEAR Act). the No Fear title has not appeared but The Marsha Coleman-Adebayo Story was announced as the next major project of No Fear Media Productions.
Glover portrayed David Keaton in the film The Exonerated—a real-life story of Keaton's experience of being arrested, jailed, and then freed from death row.
In 2009, Glover performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Glover played President Wilson, the President of the United States in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in theaters November 13, 2009. In 2010, Glover participated in a Spanish film called I Want to Be a Soldier. In 2012, he starred in the film Donovan's Echo.
Glover co-starred in the science fiction comedy film Sorry to Bother You, which was released in theaters on July 6, 2018.
Planned directorial debut
Glover sought to make a film biography of Toussaint Louverture for his directorial debut. In May 2006, the film had included cast members Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Guenveur Smith, Mos Def, Isaach de Bankolé, and Richard Bohringer. Production, estimated to cost $30 million, was planned to begin in Poland, filming from late 2006 into early 2007. In May 2007, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez contributed $18 million to fund the production of Toussaint for Glover, who was a prominent U.S. supporter of Chávez. The contribution annoyed some Venezuelan filmmakers, who said the money could have funded other homegrown films and that Glover's film was not even about Venezuela. In April 2008, the Venezuelan National Assembly authorized an additional $9,840,505 for Glover's film, which is still in planning. In 2015, Glover gave an update on the Toussaint project, stating, "The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me."
Public appearances
Glover appeared at London Film and Comic Con 2013 at Earls Court 2 over 2.5 days during Friday 5th to Sunday, July 7. He participated in a panel discussion in McComb, Mississippi on July 16, 2015. The event, co-sponsored by The Gloster Project and Jubilee Performing Arts Center, included noted authors Terry McMillan and Quincy Troupe.
On January 30, 2015, Glover was the Keynote Speaker and 2015 Honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Glover used his career and personal story to speak on the topic "Creativity and Democracy: Social Change through the Arts". At the University of the Virgin Islands, Glover gave a speech that encouraged the graduates in their upcoming journey.
It was announced in July 2018 that Glover will be the featured guest at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State.
Personal life
Glover married Asake Bomani in 1975 and they have a daughter, Mandisa, born in 1976. Glover and Bomani divorced in 2000. Glover married Eliane Cavalleiro in 2009.
Glover purchased a house in Dunthorpe, Oregon, in 1999. As of 2011, he no longer lives in Oregon.
On April 16, 2010, Glover was arrested in Maryland during a protest by SEIU workers for Sodexo's alleged unfair and illegal treatment of workers. He was given a citation and later released. The Associated Press reports "Glover and others stepped past yellow police tape and were asked to step back three times at Sodexo headquarters. When they refused, officers arrested them."
Glover is a Babalawo.
Activism
Civil rights activism
While attending San Francisco State University (SFSU), Glover was a member of the Black Students' Union, which, along with the Third World Liberation Front and the American Federation of Teachers, collaborated in a five-month student-led strike to establish a Department of Black Studies. The strike was the longest student walkout in U.S. history. It helped create not only the first Department of Black Studies but also the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States.
Hari Dillon, current president of the Vanguard Public Foundation, was a fellow striker at SFSU. Glover later co-chaired Vanguard's board. He is also a board member of the Algebra Project, the Black AIDS Institute, Walden House and Cheryl Byron's Something Positive Dance Group. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly after being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during a protest over Sudan's humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
In 1999, he used his leverage as a former San Francisco cab driver to raise awareness about African Americans being passed over for white passengers. In response, Rudolph Giuliani launched Operation Refusal, which suspended the licenses of cab drivers who favored white passengers over black ones.
Glover's long history of union activism includes support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, and numerous service unions. In March 2010, Glover supported 375 Union workers in Ohio by calling upon all actors at the 2010 Academy Awards to boycott Hugo Boss suits following announcement of Hugo Boss's decision to close a manufacturing plant in Ohio after a proposed pay decrease from $13 to $8.30 an hour was rejected by the Workers United Union.
On November 1, 2011, Glover spoke to the crowd at Occupy Oakland on the day before the Oakland General Strike where thousands of protestors shut down the Port of Oakland.
Political activism
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In February 2019, Glover again endorsed Sanders for US president in 2020.
In 2017, he co-authored a petition along with Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Nancy Fraser, Oliver Stone and Eve Ensler, urging French citizens to vote for candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 presidential election.
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics."
Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election.
On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?"
Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker.
International
Africa
Glover is an active board member of the TransAfrica Forum. On April 6, 2009, Glover was given a chieftaincy title in Imo State, Nigeria. His title, "Enyioma of Nkwerre", means A Good Friend in the language of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.
Brazil
In 2018, Glover, as the UN Goodwill Ambassador, met with Lula to express solidarity and support for his presidential candidacy. During a trip to Brazil, he also met with the family of Marielle Franco, the City Council member and LGBT activist murdered in Rio de Janeiro.
Caribbean and Haiti
On January 13, 2010, Glover compared the scale and devastation of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the predicament other island nations may face as a result of the failed Copenhagen summit the previous year. Glover said: "the threat of what happens to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations ... they're all in peril because of global warming ... because of climate change ... when we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens". In the same statement, he called for a new form of international partnership with Haiti and other Caribbean nations and praised Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, for already accepting this partnership.
Iraq War
Danny Glover had been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War before the war began in March 2003. In February 2003, he was one of the featured speakers at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco where other notable speakers included names such as author Alice Walker, singer Joan Baez, United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.
Glover was a signatory to the April 2003 anti-war letter "To the Conscience of the World" that criticized the unilateral American invasion of Iraq that led to "massive loss of civilian life" and "devastation of one of the cultural patrimonies of humanity".
During an anti-war demonstration in Downtown Oakland in March 2003, Glover praised the community leaders for their anti-war efforts saying that "They're on the front lines because they are trying to make a better America. ... The world has come together and said 'no' to this war – and we must stand with them."
Venezuela
In January 2006, Harry Belafonte led a delegation of activists, including Glover, activist/professor Cornel West, and activist/Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Founder and Executive Director Daniel NANE Alejandrez in a meeting with President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez. In 2006, Glover had begun working on a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led the 18th century revolt in Haiti and, it was reported, that Chavez supported the film, "hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression." In 2007, Glover agreed with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that the Touissant Louverture film would be financed by Venezuela. On May 19, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela approved giving Glover $18,000,000 for the film. The following year, on April 9, 2008, the National Assembly of Venezuela, at the request of the Chávez, approved another $9,000,000 to be handed to Glover in order to "continue" the filming of the film about Touissant. Surprisingly, in an interview dated January 5, 2015, published in Filmmaker magazine, Glover says, “The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me”. As of 2015, the film had not been made.
Glover was also a board member of TeleSUR, a media network primarily funded by the Venezuelan government. During the beginning of the 2014 Venezuela Protests, Glover shared his support to Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, calling members of his government "the stewards" of Venezuela's democracy. Glover also told Venezuelan government supporters to go fight for the sovereignty of Maduro's government. Through the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Glover continued to show his support for the Bolivarian government and President Maduro's administration.
Israel
On September 2, 2009, Glover signed an open letter of objection to the inclusion of a series of films intended to showcase Tel Aviv—without the participation of Palestinian filmmakers, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Music
Glover has become an active member of board of directors of The Jazz Foundation of America. He became involved with The Jazz Foundation in 2005, and has been a featured host for their annual benefit A Great Night in Harlem for several years, as well appearing as a celebrity MC at other events for the foundation. In 2006, Britain's leading African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi appointed Glover as one of its three Patrons, joining Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jocelyn Jee Esien opening the organization's tenth-anniversary celebrations (February 2, 2008) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
Filmography
Awards and honours
In 2010, Glover delivered the Commencement Address and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Utah State University. The same year, Starr King School for the Ministry awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters in absentia. He was awarded the doctorate specifically for his long history of activism, including support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, The Algebra Project, The Black AIDS Institute, as well as his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Haiti earthquake victims, literacy and civil rights and his fight against unjust labor practices.
He was also the recipient of a tribute paid by the Deauville American Film Festival in France on September 7, 2011.
Glover was awarded the Cuban National Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Council of State on December 29, 2016 in a ceremony in Havana for his solidarity with the Cuban 5 during their time of incarceration in the United States.
See also
List of peace activists
References
External links
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
Activists from California
African-American activists
African-American film directors
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American television producers
American anti-war activists
American civil rights activists
American Conservatory Theater alumni
American film producers
American humanitarians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
American political activists
Audiobook narrators
Center for Economic and Policy Research
City College of San Francisco alumni
Film directors from San Francisco
Film producers from California
Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Male actors from California
Male actors from Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
People from Dunthorpe, Oregon
People with dyslexia
People with epilepsy
San Francisco State University alumni
Television producers from California
Television producers from Oregon
| true |
[
"The Patriotic League () was a political movement founded in 1935 in Estonia, and thereafter, until 1940, the only legal political quasi-party, as the activities of any political party were suspended in the country during that time.\n\nHistory\nAfter Konstantin Päts's self-coup in 1934, the activities of all political parties – including Päts's own Union of Settlers and Smallholders – were suspended. The Patriotic League was established on 9 March 1935 as the political movement of the establishment, with the opposition parties' activities remaining suspended.\n\nElections for a National Assembly to draft a new constitution were held in 1936. The Patriotic League's candidates ran unopposed in 50 of the 80 seats, as the opposition parties were allowed to field only individual candidates.\n\nPrior to the 1938 elections the Patriotic League formed the National Front for the Implementation of the Constitution to run in the election, although the Front was effectively the same organisation.\n\nReferences\n\nDefunct political parties in Estonia\nPolitical parties established in 1935\nPolitical parties disestablished in 1940\nParties of one-party systems",
"John H. Hamlin (June 21, 1909 – April 1981) graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in 1929. He was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania.\n\nHamlin had a multifaceted career. During World War II, Hamlin was an intelligence officer in the Navy and retired as a Lieutenant Commander in 1945. From 1946 to 1951, Hamlin served as Executive Secretary to the Republican State Central Committee of California.\n\nIn 1954, Hamlin was appointed the Director for Small Business for the Department of Defense. Two years later in his role as the executive Assistant to the President (under President Dwight D. Eisenhower), Hamlin fulfilled a political function. His duties were to keep various segments of the Executive Branch and the Republican National Committee aware of each other's activities. He compiled background reports on the large agencies, current administration problems, pronouncements and goals. These reports were actually in-depth analyses of what the different agencies were doing and what they were spending. Eventually these background reports became progress reports designed to alert the White House Staff and other members of the Eisenhower \"team\" to developments in different agencies which might warrant study or action, especially if they had economic implications. These reports could be used by Republican members to analyze what the Administration was doing and to provide speech materials. \n\nIn addition to the progress reports, Hamlin also compiled a number of studies on the activities of government agencies and departments for the consideration of the Committee on Government Activities Affecting Prices and Costs. The purpose of the Committee on Government Activities Affecting Prices and Costs created by Executive Order 10802, January 23, 1959, was to provide a central mechanism in the Federal Government to follow the current activities of the Federal agencies to see whether they were being conducted, insofar as possible, in line with the need for reasonable stability of prices and costs, and to ensure that the Federal Government was not contributing to the nation's inflationary problems by the way in which it conducted its business. The Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Raymond J. Saulnier, was designated as the Chairman of the Committee on Government Activities Affecting Prices and Costs.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nPapers of John H. Hamlin, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library\nRecords of John H. Hamlin, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library\n\nStanford University alumni\nPeople from Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania\nAmerican intelligence analysts\nEisenhower administration personnel\n1909 births\n1981 deaths\nPennsylvania Republicans"
] |
[
"Danny Glover",
"Political activism",
"When did Glover's political activities begin?",
"I don't know.",
"What was one of his political activities?",
"Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling"
] |
C_e2c9ab9fcb7341b0b6869c12931cafe5_0
|
What did he say about Bush?
| 3 |
What did Danny Glover say about George Bush?
|
Danny Glover
|
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics." Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election. On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?" Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker. CANNOTANSWER
|
him a known racist. "
|
Danny Lebern Glover (; born July 22, 1946) is an American actor, film director, and political activist. He is widely known for his lead role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film series. He also had leading roles in his films included The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, Predator 2, Angels in the Outfield, and Operation Dumbo Drop. Glover has prominent supporting roles in Silverado, Witness, A Rage in Harlem, Dreamgirls, Shooter, Death at a Funeral, Beyond the Lights, Sorry to Bother You, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Dead Don't Die, Lonesome Dove and Jumanji: The Next Level. He is also an active supporter of various political causes.
In 2021, it was announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would bestow the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Glover for his "decades-long advocacy for justice and human rights [which] reflects his dedication to recognizing our shared humanity on and off the screen".
Early life
Glover was born in San Francisco, the son of Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover. His parents, both postal workers, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to advance equal rights. Glover's mother, daughter of a midwife, was born in Louisville, Georgia and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. His father was a World War II veteran. He graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco.
As an adolescent and a young adult, Glover suffered from epilepsy but has not suffered a seizure since age 35. He attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s but did not graduate. SFSU later awarded him the Presidential Medal of San Francisco State University for his service to education. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
Career
Glover originally worked in city administration working on community development before transitioning to theater. He has said:
I didn't think it was a difficult transition. Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings—all within that realm of the capacity it represents. It may have been a leap of faith for me, given not only my learning disability (dyslexia) but also the fact that I felt awkward. I felt all the things that someone that's 6′3″ or 6′4″ feels and with my own diminished expectations of who I could be [and] would feel. Whether it's art, acting or theater that I've devoted myself to I put more passion and more energy into it.
His first theater involvement was with the American Conservatory Theater, a regional training program in San Francisco. Glover also trained with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab in San Francisco. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Glover credited Jean Shelton for much of his development as an actor. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Glover resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor. Glover then moved to Los Angeles for more opportunities in acting, where he would later go on to co-found the Robey Theatre Company with actor Ben Guillory in honor of the actor and concert singer Paul Robeson in Los Angeles in 1994.
Glover has had a variety of film, stage, and television roles, and is best known for playing Los Angeles police Sergeant Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series of action films, starring alongside Mel Gibson, and Joe Pesci. Later he once again starred with Gary Busey in the blockbuster Predator 2. He also starred as the husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in the celebrated literary adaptation The Color Purple, and as Lieutenant James McFee in the film Witness. In 1994 he made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override.
Also in 1994, Glover and actor Ben Guillory founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, focusing on theatre by and about black people. During his career, he has made several cameos, appearing, for example, in the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl" of 1987. Glover earned top billing for the first time in Predator 2, the sequel to the science fiction action film Predator. That same year he starred in Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
In common with Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have played Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe, Glover played the role in the episode "Red Wind" of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels. In 1997, under his former production company banner Carrie Films, Glover executive produced numerous films of first time directors including Pamm Malveaux's neo-noir short film Final Act starring Joe Morton, which aired on the Independent Film Channel. In addition, Glover has been a voice actor in many children's movies. Glover was featured in the popular 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson.
In 2004, he appeared in the low-budget horror film Saw as Detective David Tapp. In 2005, Glover and Joslyn Barnes announced plans to make No FEAR, a film about Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's experience. Coleman-Adebayo won a 2000 jury trial against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The jury found the EPA guilty of violating the civil rights of Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race, sex, color, and a hostile work environment, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman-Adebayo was terminated shortly after she revealed the environmental and human disaster taking place in the Brits, South Africa, vanadium mines. Her experience inspired the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No-FEAR Act). the No Fear title has not appeared but The Marsha Coleman-Adebayo Story was announced as the next major project of No Fear Media Productions.
Glover portrayed David Keaton in the film The Exonerated—a real-life story of Keaton's experience of being arrested, jailed, and then freed from death row.
In 2009, Glover performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Glover played President Wilson, the President of the United States in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in theaters November 13, 2009. In 2010, Glover participated in a Spanish film called I Want to Be a Soldier. In 2012, he starred in the film Donovan's Echo.
Glover co-starred in the science fiction comedy film Sorry to Bother You, which was released in theaters on July 6, 2018.
Planned directorial debut
Glover sought to make a film biography of Toussaint Louverture for his directorial debut. In May 2006, the film had included cast members Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Guenveur Smith, Mos Def, Isaach de Bankolé, and Richard Bohringer. Production, estimated to cost $30 million, was planned to begin in Poland, filming from late 2006 into early 2007. In May 2007, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez contributed $18 million to fund the production of Toussaint for Glover, who was a prominent U.S. supporter of Chávez. The contribution annoyed some Venezuelan filmmakers, who said the money could have funded other homegrown films and that Glover's film was not even about Venezuela. In April 2008, the Venezuelan National Assembly authorized an additional $9,840,505 for Glover's film, which is still in planning. In 2015, Glover gave an update on the Toussaint project, stating, "The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me."
Public appearances
Glover appeared at London Film and Comic Con 2013 at Earls Court 2 over 2.5 days during Friday 5th to Sunday, July 7. He participated in a panel discussion in McComb, Mississippi on July 16, 2015. The event, co-sponsored by The Gloster Project and Jubilee Performing Arts Center, included noted authors Terry McMillan and Quincy Troupe.
On January 30, 2015, Glover was the Keynote Speaker and 2015 Honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Glover used his career and personal story to speak on the topic "Creativity and Democracy: Social Change through the Arts". At the University of the Virgin Islands, Glover gave a speech that encouraged the graduates in their upcoming journey.
It was announced in July 2018 that Glover will be the featured guest at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State.
Personal life
Glover married Asake Bomani in 1975 and they have a daughter, Mandisa, born in 1976. Glover and Bomani divorced in 2000. Glover married Eliane Cavalleiro in 2009.
Glover purchased a house in Dunthorpe, Oregon, in 1999. As of 2011, he no longer lives in Oregon.
On April 16, 2010, Glover was arrested in Maryland during a protest by SEIU workers for Sodexo's alleged unfair and illegal treatment of workers. He was given a citation and later released. The Associated Press reports "Glover and others stepped past yellow police tape and were asked to step back three times at Sodexo headquarters. When they refused, officers arrested them."
Glover is a Babalawo.
Activism
Civil rights activism
While attending San Francisco State University (SFSU), Glover was a member of the Black Students' Union, which, along with the Third World Liberation Front and the American Federation of Teachers, collaborated in a five-month student-led strike to establish a Department of Black Studies. The strike was the longest student walkout in U.S. history. It helped create not only the first Department of Black Studies but also the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States.
Hari Dillon, current president of the Vanguard Public Foundation, was a fellow striker at SFSU. Glover later co-chaired Vanguard's board. He is also a board member of the Algebra Project, the Black AIDS Institute, Walden House and Cheryl Byron's Something Positive Dance Group. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly after being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during a protest over Sudan's humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
In 1999, he used his leverage as a former San Francisco cab driver to raise awareness about African Americans being passed over for white passengers. In response, Rudolph Giuliani launched Operation Refusal, which suspended the licenses of cab drivers who favored white passengers over black ones.
Glover's long history of union activism includes support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, and numerous service unions. In March 2010, Glover supported 375 Union workers in Ohio by calling upon all actors at the 2010 Academy Awards to boycott Hugo Boss suits following announcement of Hugo Boss's decision to close a manufacturing plant in Ohio after a proposed pay decrease from $13 to $8.30 an hour was rejected by the Workers United Union.
On November 1, 2011, Glover spoke to the crowd at Occupy Oakland on the day before the Oakland General Strike where thousands of protestors shut down the Port of Oakland.
Political activism
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In February 2019, Glover again endorsed Sanders for US president in 2020.
In 2017, he co-authored a petition along with Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Nancy Fraser, Oliver Stone and Eve Ensler, urging French citizens to vote for candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 presidential election.
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics."
Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election.
On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?"
Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker.
International
Africa
Glover is an active board member of the TransAfrica Forum. On April 6, 2009, Glover was given a chieftaincy title in Imo State, Nigeria. His title, "Enyioma of Nkwerre", means A Good Friend in the language of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.
Brazil
In 2018, Glover, as the UN Goodwill Ambassador, met with Lula to express solidarity and support for his presidential candidacy. During a trip to Brazil, he also met with the family of Marielle Franco, the City Council member and LGBT activist murdered in Rio de Janeiro.
Caribbean and Haiti
On January 13, 2010, Glover compared the scale and devastation of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the predicament other island nations may face as a result of the failed Copenhagen summit the previous year. Glover said: "the threat of what happens to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations ... they're all in peril because of global warming ... because of climate change ... when we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens". In the same statement, he called for a new form of international partnership with Haiti and other Caribbean nations and praised Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, for already accepting this partnership.
Iraq War
Danny Glover had been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War before the war began in March 2003. In February 2003, he was one of the featured speakers at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco where other notable speakers included names such as author Alice Walker, singer Joan Baez, United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.
Glover was a signatory to the April 2003 anti-war letter "To the Conscience of the World" that criticized the unilateral American invasion of Iraq that led to "massive loss of civilian life" and "devastation of one of the cultural patrimonies of humanity".
During an anti-war demonstration in Downtown Oakland in March 2003, Glover praised the community leaders for their anti-war efforts saying that "They're on the front lines because they are trying to make a better America. ... The world has come together and said 'no' to this war – and we must stand with them."
Venezuela
In January 2006, Harry Belafonte led a delegation of activists, including Glover, activist/professor Cornel West, and activist/Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Founder and Executive Director Daniel NANE Alejandrez in a meeting with President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez. In 2006, Glover had begun working on a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led the 18th century revolt in Haiti and, it was reported, that Chavez supported the film, "hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression." In 2007, Glover agreed with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that the Touissant Louverture film would be financed by Venezuela. On May 19, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela approved giving Glover $18,000,000 for the film. The following year, on April 9, 2008, the National Assembly of Venezuela, at the request of the Chávez, approved another $9,000,000 to be handed to Glover in order to "continue" the filming of the film about Touissant. Surprisingly, in an interview dated January 5, 2015, published in Filmmaker magazine, Glover says, “The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me”. As of 2015, the film had not been made.
Glover was also a board member of TeleSUR, a media network primarily funded by the Venezuelan government. During the beginning of the 2014 Venezuela Protests, Glover shared his support to Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, calling members of his government "the stewards" of Venezuela's democracy. Glover also told Venezuelan government supporters to go fight for the sovereignty of Maduro's government. Through the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Glover continued to show his support for the Bolivarian government and President Maduro's administration.
Israel
On September 2, 2009, Glover signed an open letter of objection to the inclusion of a series of films intended to showcase Tel Aviv—without the participation of Palestinian filmmakers, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Music
Glover has become an active member of board of directors of The Jazz Foundation of America. He became involved with The Jazz Foundation in 2005, and has been a featured host for their annual benefit A Great Night in Harlem for several years, as well appearing as a celebrity MC at other events for the foundation. In 2006, Britain's leading African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi appointed Glover as one of its three Patrons, joining Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jocelyn Jee Esien opening the organization's tenth-anniversary celebrations (February 2, 2008) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
Filmography
Awards and honours
In 2010, Glover delivered the Commencement Address and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Utah State University. The same year, Starr King School for the Ministry awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters in absentia. He was awarded the doctorate specifically for his long history of activism, including support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, The Algebra Project, The Black AIDS Institute, as well as his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Haiti earthquake victims, literacy and civil rights and his fight against unjust labor practices.
He was also the recipient of a tribute paid by the Deauville American Film Festival in France on September 7, 2011.
Glover was awarded the Cuban National Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Council of State on December 29, 2016 in a ceremony in Havana for his solidarity with the Cuban 5 during their time of incarceration in the United States.
See also
List of peace activists
References
External links
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
Activists from California
African-American activists
African-American film directors
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American television producers
American anti-war activists
American civil rights activists
American Conservatory Theater alumni
American film producers
American humanitarians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
American political activists
Audiobook narrators
Center for Economic and Policy Research
City College of San Francisco alumni
Film directors from San Francisco
Film producers from California
Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Male actors from California
Male actors from Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
People from Dunthorpe, Oregon
People with dyslexia
People with epilepsy
San Francisco State University alumni
Television producers from California
Television producers from Oregon
| true |
[
"Jonathan James Bush (May 6, 1931 – May 5, 2021) was an American banker who was the fourth child and third son of U. S. Senator Prescott Bush and his wife Dorothy Bush. He was the brother of former Congressman, CIA Director, Vice President and President George H. W. Bush. He was also the uncle of former Texas Governor and President George W. Bush, and former Florida Secretary of Commerce and Governor Jeb Bush. He died in Florida, hours before his ninetieth birthday.\n\nEarly life\nBush was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to Prescott Sheldon Bush, a politician, and Dorothy Walker Bush. He graduated from The Hotchkiss School and Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. The fourth child in the family, he was the brother of Prescott \"Pressy\" Bush, Jr. (1922–2010), the 41st President of the United States George H. W. Bush (1924–2018), Nancy Bush Ellis (1926–2021), and William \"Bucky\" Bush (1938–2018). He was the uncle of the 43rd President George W. Bush. Like his brother George H. W. Bush, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale.\n\nBush and his wife Josephine are the parents of former NBC entertainment reporter Billy Bush and health care executive Jonathan S. Bush.\n\nCareer\nAs of December 31, 2018, Jonathan Bush had retired from Fairfield, Bush & Co., an Investment Advisory Firm in New Haven, Connecticut.\n\nJonathan Bush founded J. Bush & Co., which provided discreet banking services for the Washington, D.C., embassies of foreign governments for many years. In 1997, Riggs Bank bought J. Bush & Co. and made Bush CEO & President of Riggs Investment, a firm based in New Haven, Connecticut.\n\nIn the early 1980s, Jonathan Bush helped organize investors for George W. Bush's first oil venture, Arbusto Energy, later called Bush Explorations.\n\nDuring the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush was a major contributor and fundraiser to his nephew's election and was named a \"Bush Pioneer\" for raising more than $100,000 for the campaign.\n\nBush died on May 5, 2021, the day before his 90th birthday. At the time of his death, he was the last surviving child of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush.\n\nControversy\nOn May 15, 2004, The Washington Post published an article that said, \"A political Web site written by a Democratic operative drew attention yesterday to the fact that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering.\"\n\nThe bank accounts under investigation may have been Saudi, though the article did not say so. It did, however, go on to say: \"a source familiar with the multiple federal investigations of the bank's Saudi accounts and other embassy accounts say Jonathan Bush's investment advice unit has 'no relationship whatsoever' with any of the Riggs's Saudi accounts.\" Moreover, the newspaper quoted a spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as saying \"any suggestion of political influence in the Riggs situation is 'preposterous.'\"\n\nIn 1991, Bush was fined $30,000 in Massachusetts and several thousand dollars in Connecticut for violating registration laws governing securities sales. He was barred from securities brokerage with the general public in Massachusetts for one year.\n\nReferences\n\n1931 births\n2021 deaths\nAmerican bankers\nAmerican political fundraisers\nBush family\nBusinesspeople from Maine\nBusinesspeople from Greenwich, Connecticut\nConnecticut Republicans\nMaine Republicans\nHotchkiss School alumni\nYale University alumni\nPeople from North Haven, Maine",
"\"The Pet Goat\" (often erroneously called \"My Pet Goat\") is a grade-school level reading exercise composed by American educationalist Siegfried \"Zig\" Engelmann. It achieved notoriety for being read by US President George W. Bush with a class of second-graders on the morning of September 11, 2001. After being discreetly informed of the September 11 attacks midway through the reading by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Bush waited quietly for the reading to finish before dealing with the unfolding crisis. The episode figures prominently in the retrospective assessment of Bush's response to the September 11 attacks.\n\nReading exercise\n\"The Pet Goat\" was composed by Siegfried \"Zig\" Engelmann, who had written over a thousand similar instructional exercises since the 1970s. It was anthologized in the classroom workbook Reading Mastery: Rainbow Edition, Level 2, Storybook 1. \"The Pet Goat\" is designed to teach student about words ending in the letter E, using the Direct Instruction (DI) teaching method. The exercise tells a story about a girl's pet goat, which her parents want to get rid of because it eats everything; the parents relent after it foils a robbery by butting the intruder, who is now \"sore\" (that word ending in e).\n\nGeorge W. Bush during the September 11 attacks\n\nOn September 11, 2001, US President George W. Bush went to Emma E. Booker Elementary School to meet students and staff and to bring attention to his plans for education reform. Upon arriving at the Sarasota, Florida school, the president was informed of the first plane crash into One World Trade Center, though he was briefed that it was probably just a small propeller plane. While President Bush sat in Kay Daniels' classroom, and her students read \"The Pet Goat\", White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card interrupted the president to whisper in his ear: \"A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.\"\n\nAfterwards, the children continued to read and President Bush sat while—as described by The Wall Street Journal—\"trying to keep under tight control.\" Despite the president's efforts, students knew something was wrong; they later said that the president's face became red and serious, and his expression was \"flabbergasted, shocked, [and] horrified\".\n\nAccording to Bill Sammon's book Fighting Back, Bush's gaze flitted about the room—the children, the press, the floor, his staff—while his mind raced about everything he did not yet know. After receiving cue-card advice from his press secretary, Ari Fleischer (\"DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET\"), the \"notoriously punctual\" president lingered in the classroom after the reading exercise was finished: he adamantly did not want to give an appearance of panic. After chatting with the students and their teacher, Bush deflected a Trade Center-related question from a reporter, and began to learn about the magnitude of the attacks.\n\nPublic attention to \"The Pet Goat\" first came to the fore with Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, though the film incorrectly gave the title as \"My Pet Goat\" and called it a book. Within a few weeks, a blogger named Peter Smith tracked down the correct name and origin as a reading exercise by Engelmann.\n\nReactions\nThe New Yorker described a seven-minute video of President Bush holding Reading Mastery while \"staring blankly into space\" as the most memorable bit in Fahrenheit 9/11; the film presents the president as faltering in the face of the crisis.\n\nThe commander-in-chief's supporters argued that there was nothing for Bush to do but wait for more information while not alarming the pupils. On his own behalf, Bush said that \"his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis. The national press corps was standing behind the children in the classroom; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.\" Booker Elementary Principal Tose-Rigell supported the president's reactions at her school—\"I don't think anyone could have handled it better. What would it have served if [Bush] had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?\"—as did Daniels' students, who later said that Bush's actions were the right ones.\n\nA year after the attacks, Kay Daniels' classroom still had the chair in which the president sat; it was festooned with a purple ribbon. By 2004, Engelmann (then a retired professor) was surprised at the attention \"The Pet Goat\" received: \"It hasn't brought me any fame, […] It's fascinating that anyone would even be interested in something like this.\"\n\nEditions\n\nReferences\n\nanimal tales\nchildren's short stories\nfiction about goats\nGeorge W. Bush\nSeptember 11 attacks"
] |
[
"Danny Glover",
"Political activism",
"When did Glover's political activities begin?",
"I don't know.",
"What was one of his political activities?",
"Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling",
"What did he say about Bush?",
"him a known racist. \""
] |
C_e2c9ab9fcb7341b0b6869c12931cafe5_0
|
Did Bush respond?
| 4 |
Did George Bush respond to Danny Glover's comments about George Bush?
|
Danny Glover
|
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics." Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election. On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?" Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Danny Lebern Glover (; born July 22, 1946) is an American actor, film director, and political activist. He is widely known for his lead role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film series. He also had leading roles in his films included The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, Predator 2, Angels in the Outfield, and Operation Dumbo Drop. Glover has prominent supporting roles in Silverado, Witness, A Rage in Harlem, Dreamgirls, Shooter, Death at a Funeral, Beyond the Lights, Sorry to Bother You, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Dead Don't Die, Lonesome Dove and Jumanji: The Next Level. He is also an active supporter of various political causes.
In 2021, it was announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would bestow the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Glover for his "decades-long advocacy for justice and human rights [which] reflects his dedication to recognizing our shared humanity on and off the screen".
Early life
Glover was born in San Francisco, the son of Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover. His parents, both postal workers, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to advance equal rights. Glover's mother, daughter of a midwife, was born in Louisville, Georgia and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. His father was a World War II veteran. He graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco.
As an adolescent and a young adult, Glover suffered from epilepsy but has not suffered a seizure since age 35. He attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s but did not graduate. SFSU later awarded him the Presidential Medal of San Francisco State University for his service to education. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
Career
Glover originally worked in city administration working on community development before transitioning to theater. He has said:
I didn't think it was a difficult transition. Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings—all within that realm of the capacity it represents. It may have been a leap of faith for me, given not only my learning disability (dyslexia) but also the fact that I felt awkward. I felt all the things that someone that's 6′3″ or 6′4″ feels and with my own diminished expectations of who I could be [and] would feel. Whether it's art, acting or theater that I've devoted myself to I put more passion and more energy into it.
His first theater involvement was with the American Conservatory Theater, a regional training program in San Francisco. Glover also trained with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab in San Francisco. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Glover credited Jean Shelton for much of his development as an actor. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Glover resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor. Glover then moved to Los Angeles for more opportunities in acting, where he would later go on to co-found the Robey Theatre Company with actor Ben Guillory in honor of the actor and concert singer Paul Robeson in Los Angeles in 1994.
Glover has had a variety of film, stage, and television roles, and is best known for playing Los Angeles police Sergeant Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series of action films, starring alongside Mel Gibson, and Joe Pesci. Later he once again starred with Gary Busey in the blockbuster Predator 2. He also starred as the husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in the celebrated literary adaptation The Color Purple, and as Lieutenant James McFee in the film Witness. In 1994 he made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override.
Also in 1994, Glover and actor Ben Guillory founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, focusing on theatre by and about black people. During his career, he has made several cameos, appearing, for example, in the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl" of 1987. Glover earned top billing for the first time in Predator 2, the sequel to the science fiction action film Predator. That same year he starred in Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
In common with Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have played Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe, Glover played the role in the episode "Red Wind" of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels. In 1997, under his former production company banner Carrie Films, Glover executive produced numerous films of first time directors including Pamm Malveaux's neo-noir short film Final Act starring Joe Morton, which aired on the Independent Film Channel. In addition, Glover has been a voice actor in many children's movies. Glover was featured in the popular 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson.
In 2004, he appeared in the low-budget horror film Saw as Detective David Tapp. In 2005, Glover and Joslyn Barnes announced plans to make No FEAR, a film about Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's experience. Coleman-Adebayo won a 2000 jury trial against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The jury found the EPA guilty of violating the civil rights of Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race, sex, color, and a hostile work environment, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman-Adebayo was terminated shortly after she revealed the environmental and human disaster taking place in the Brits, South Africa, vanadium mines. Her experience inspired the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No-FEAR Act). the No Fear title has not appeared but The Marsha Coleman-Adebayo Story was announced as the next major project of No Fear Media Productions.
Glover portrayed David Keaton in the film The Exonerated—a real-life story of Keaton's experience of being arrested, jailed, and then freed from death row.
In 2009, Glover performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Glover played President Wilson, the President of the United States in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in theaters November 13, 2009. In 2010, Glover participated in a Spanish film called I Want to Be a Soldier. In 2012, he starred in the film Donovan's Echo.
Glover co-starred in the science fiction comedy film Sorry to Bother You, which was released in theaters on July 6, 2018.
Planned directorial debut
Glover sought to make a film biography of Toussaint Louverture for his directorial debut. In May 2006, the film had included cast members Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Guenveur Smith, Mos Def, Isaach de Bankolé, and Richard Bohringer. Production, estimated to cost $30 million, was planned to begin in Poland, filming from late 2006 into early 2007. In May 2007, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez contributed $18 million to fund the production of Toussaint for Glover, who was a prominent U.S. supporter of Chávez. The contribution annoyed some Venezuelan filmmakers, who said the money could have funded other homegrown films and that Glover's film was not even about Venezuela. In April 2008, the Venezuelan National Assembly authorized an additional $9,840,505 for Glover's film, which is still in planning. In 2015, Glover gave an update on the Toussaint project, stating, "The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me."
Public appearances
Glover appeared at London Film and Comic Con 2013 at Earls Court 2 over 2.5 days during Friday 5th to Sunday, July 7. He participated in a panel discussion in McComb, Mississippi on July 16, 2015. The event, co-sponsored by The Gloster Project and Jubilee Performing Arts Center, included noted authors Terry McMillan and Quincy Troupe.
On January 30, 2015, Glover was the Keynote Speaker and 2015 Honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Glover used his career and personal story to speak on the topic "Creativity and Democracy: Social Change through the Arts". At the University of the Virgin Islands, Glover gave a speech that encouraged the graduates in their upcoming journey.
It was announced in July 2018 that Glover will be the featured guest at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State.
Personal life
Glover married Asake Bomani in 1975 and they have a daughter, Mandisa, born in 1976. Glover and Bomani divorced in 2000. Glover married Eliane Cavalleiro in 2009.
Glover purchased a house in Dunthorpe, Oregon, in 1999. As of 2011, he no longer lives in Oregon.
On April 16, 2010, Glover was arrested in Maryland during a protest by SEIU workers for Sodexo's alleged unfair and illegal treatment of workers. He was given a citation and later released. The Associated Press reports "Glover and others stepped past yellow police tape and were asked to step back three times at Sodexo headquarters. When they refused, officers arrested them."
Glover is a Babalawo.
Activism
Civil rights activism
While attending San Francisco State University (SFSU), Glover was a member of the Black Students' Union, which, along with the Third World Liberation Front and the American Federation of Teachers, collaborated in a five-month student-led strike to establish a Department of Black Studies. The strike was the longest student walkout in U.S. history. It helped create not only the first Department of Black Studies but also the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States.
Hari Dillon, current president of the Vanguard Public Foundation, was a fellow striker at SFSU. Glover later co-chaired Vanguard's board. He is also a board member of the Algebra Project, the Black AIDS Institute, Walden House and Cheryl Byron's Something Positive Dance Group. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly after being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during a protest over Sudan's humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
In 1999, he used his leverage as a former San Francisco cab driver to raise awareness about African Americans being passed over for white passengers. In response, Rudolph Giuliani launched Operation Refusal, which suspended the licenses of cab drivers who favored white passengers over black ones.
Glover's long history of union activism includes support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, and numerous service unions. In March 2010, Glover supported 375 Union workers in Ohio by calling upon all actors at the 2010 Academy Awards to boycott Hugo Boss suits following announcement of Hugo Boss's decision to close a manufacturing plant in Ohio after a proposed pay decrease from $13 to $8.30 an hour was rejected by the Workers United Union.
On November 1, 2011, Glover spoke to the crowd at Occupy Oakland on the day before the Oakland General Strike where thousands of protestors shut down the Port of Oakland.
Political activism
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In February 2019, Glover again endorsed Sanders for US president in 2020.
In 2017, he co-authored a petition along with Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Nancy Fraser, Oliver Stone and Eve Ensler, urging French citizens to vote for candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 presidential election.
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics."
Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election.
On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?"
Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker.
International
Africa
Glover is an active board member of the TransAfrica Forum. On April 6, 2009, Glover was given a chieftaincy title in Imo State, Nigeria. His title, "Enyioma of Nkwerre", means A Good Friend in the language of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.
Brazil
In 2018, Glover, as the UN Goodwill Ambassador, met with Lula to express solidarity and support for his presidential candidacy. During a trip to Brazil, he also met with the family of Marielle Franco, the City Council member and LGBT activist murdered in Rio de Janeiro.
Caribbean and Haiti
On January 13, 2010, Glover compared the scale and devastation of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the predicament other island nations may face as a result of the failed Copenhagen summit the previous year. Glover said: "the threat of what happens to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations ... they're all in peril because of global warming ... because of climate change ... when we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens". In the same statement, he called for a new form of international partnership with Haiti and other Caribbean nations and praised Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, for already accepting this partnership.
Iraq War
Danny Glover had been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War before the war began in March 2003. In February 2003, he was one of the featured speakers at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco where other notable speakers included names such as author Alice Walker, singer Joan Baez, United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.
Glover was a signatory to the April 2003 anti-war letter "To the Conscience of the World" that criticized the unilateral American invasion of Iraq that led to "massive loss of civilian life" and "devastation of one of the cultural patrimonies of humanity".
During an anti-war demonstration in Downtown Oakland in March 2003, Glover praised the community leaders for their anti-war efforts saying that "They're on the front lines because they are trying to make a better America. ... The world has come together and said 'no' to this war – and we must stand with them."
Venezuela
In January 2006, Harry Belafonte led a delegation of activists, including Glover, activist/professor Cornel West, and activist/Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Founder and Executive Director Daniel NANE Alejandrez in a meeting with President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez. In 2006, Glover had begun working on a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led the 18th century revolt in Haiti and, it was reported, that Chavez supported the film, "hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression." In 2007, Glover agreed with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that the Touissant Louverture film would be financed by Venezuela. On May 19, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela approved giving Glover $18,000,000 for the film. The following year, on April 9, 2008, the National Assembly of Venezuela, at the request of the Chávez, approved another $9,000,000 to be handed to Glover in order to "continue" the filming of the film about Touissant. Surprisingly, in an interview dated January 5, 2015, published in Filmmaker magazine, Glover says, “The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me”. As of 2015, the film had not been made.
Glover was also a board member of TeleSUR, a media network primarily funded by the Venezuelan government. During the beginning of the 2014 Venezuela Protests, Glover shared his support to Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, calling members of his government "the stewards" of Venezuela's democracy. Glover also told Venezuelan government supporters to go fight for the sovereignty of Maduro's government. Through the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Glover continued to show his support for the Bolivarian government and President Maduro's administration.
Israel
On September 2, 2009, Glover signed an open letter of objection to the inclusion of a series of films intended to showcase Tel Aviv—without the participation of Palestinian filmmakers, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Music
Glover has become an active member of board of directors of The Jazz Foundation of America. He became involved with The Jazz Foundation in 2005, and has been a featured host for their annual benefit A Great Night in Harlem for several years, as well appearing as a celebrity MC at other events for the foundation. In 2006, Britain's leading African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi appointed Glover as one of its three Patrons, joining Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jocelyn Jee Esien opening the organization's tenth-anniversary celebrations (February 2, 2008) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
Filmography
Awards and honours
In 2010, Glover delivered the Commencement Address and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Utah State University. The same year, Starr King School for the Ministry awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters in absentia. He was awarded the doctorate specifically for his long history of activism, including support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, The Algebra Project, The Black AIDS Institute, as well as his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Haiti earthquake victims, literacy and civil rights and his fight against unjust labor practices.
He was also the recipient of a tribute paid by the Deauville American Film Festival in France on September 7, 2011.
Glover was awarded the Cuban National Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Council of State on December 29, 2016 in a ceremony in Havana for his solidarity with the Cuban 5 during their time of incarceration in the United States.
See also
List of peace activists
References
External links
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
Activists from California
African-American activists
African-American film directors
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American television producers
American anti-war activists
American civil rights activists
American Conservatory Theater alumni
American film producers
American humanitarians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
American political activists
Audiobook narrators
Center for Economic and Policy Research
City College of San Francisco alumni
Film directors from San Francisco
Film producers from California
Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Male actors from California
Male actors from Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
People from Dunthorpe, Oregon
People with dyslexia
People with epilepsy
San Francisco State University alumni
Television producers from California
Television producers from Oregon
| false |
[
"The 1988 United States elections were held on November 8 and elected the members of the 101st United States Congress. The Republican Party retained the presidency, while the Democratic Party retained control of Congress.\n\nIn the 1988 presidential election, Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush defeated Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Bush won the popular vote by just under eight points, and won 426 of the 538 electoral votes. Bush won the Republican nomination over Kansas Senator Bob Dole and televangelist Pat Robertson of Virginia. Dukakis won the Democratic nomination over Reverend Jesse Jackson of Illinois, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, and Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt. Bush's victory remains the only time since Harry S. Truman's victory in the 1948 presidential election in which either party won more than two consecutive presidential elections.\n\nNeither the Senate nor the House saw any significant partisan change, and the Democratic Party retained control of both chambers. In the gubernatorial elections, the Democratic Party picked up one governorship.\n\nFederal elections\n\nPresidential election\n\nIncumbent President Ronald Reagan was ineligible to seek a third term, due to term limits established by the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution. With Reagan's support, Bush entered the 1988 Republican primaries as the front-runner. He defeated Senator Bob Dole and televangelist Pat Robertson to win the nomination, and selected Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. Dukakis won the 1988 Democratic primaries after Democratic leaders such as Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy withdrew or declined to run. He selected Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas – who had defeated Bush in a U.S. Senate race 18 years earlier – as his running mate.\n\nRunning an aggressive campaign, Bush concentrated on the economy and continuing Reagan's policies. He attacked Dukakis as an elitist \"Massachusetts liberal\", and Dukakis appeared to fail to respond effectively to Bush's criticism. Despite Dukakis's initial lead, Bush pulled ahead in opinion polling conducted in September and won by a substantial margin in both the popular and electoral vote. No candidate since 1988 has managed to equal or surpass Bush's share of the electoral or popular vote. Dukakis won 45.6% of the popular vote and carried ten states and Washington, D.C. Bush became the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.\n\nSenate elections\n\nDespite Bush's victory, the Democrats gained a net of one seat in the Senate. Seven seats changed parties, with four incumbents being defeated. The Democratic majority in the Senate increased by one from 54–46 to 55–45.\n\nHouse of Representatives elections\n\nDemocrats won the nationwide popular vote for the House of Representatives by a margin of 7.7 percentage points, picking up a net of two seats.\n\nState elections\n\nThe Democrats had a net gain of one seat in the gubernatorial elections.\n\nReferences\n\n \n1988",
"Jonathan James Bush (May 6, 1931 – May 5, 2021) was an American banker who was the fourth child and third son of U. S. Senator Prescott Bush and his wife Dorothy Bush. He was the brother of former Congressman, CIA Director, Vice President and President George H. W. Bush. He was also the uncle of former Texas Governor and President George W. Bush, and former Florida Secretary of Commerce and Governor Jeb Bush. He died in Florida, hours before his ninetieth birthday.\n\nEarly life\nBush was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to Prescott Sheldon Bush, a politician, and Dorothy Walker Bush. He graduated from The Hotchkiss School and Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. The fourth child in the family, he was the brother of Prescott \"Pressy\" Bush, Jr. (1922–2010), the 41st President of the United States George H. W. Bush (1924–2018), Nancy Bush Ellis (1926–2021), and William \"Bucky\" Bush (1938–2018). He was the uncle of the 43rd President George W. Bush. Like his brother George H. W. Bush, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale.\n\nBush and his wife Josephine are the parents of former NBC entertainment reporter Billy Bush and health care executive Jonathan S. Bush.\n\nCareer\nAs of December 31, 2018, Jonathan Bush had retired from Fairfield, Bush & Co., an Investment Advisory Firm in New Haven, Connecticut.\n\nJonathan Bush founded J. Bush & Co., which provided discreet banking services for the Washington, D.C., embassies of foreign governments for many years. In 1997, Riggs Bank bought J. Bush & Co. and made Bush CEO & President of Riggs Investment, a firm based in New Haven, Connecticut.\n\nIn the early 1980s, Jonathan Bush helped organize investors for George W. Bush's first oil venture, Arbusto Energy, later called Bush Explorations.\n\nDuring the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush was a major contributor and fundraiser to his nephew's election and was named a \"Bush Pioneer\" for raising more than $100,000 for the campaign.\n\nBush died on May 5, 2021, the day before his 90th birthday. At the time of his death, he was the last surviving child of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush.\n\nControversy\nOn May 15, 2004, The Washington Post published an article that said, \"A political Web site written by a Democratic operative drew attention yesterday to the fact that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering.\"\n\nThe bank accounts under investigation may have been Saudi, though the article did not say so. It did, however, go on to say: \"a source familiar with the multiple federal investigations of the bank's Saudi accounts and other embassy accounts say Jonathan Bush's investment advice unit has 'no relationship whatsoever' with any of the Riggs's Saudi accounts.\" Moreover, the newspaper quoted a spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as saying \"any suggestion of political influence in the Riggs situation is 'preposterous.'\"\n\nIn 1991, Bush was fined $30,000 in Massachusetts and several thousand dollars in Connecticut for violating registration laws governing securities sales. He was barred from securities brokerage with the general public in Massachusetts for one year.\n\nReferences\n\n1931 births\n2021 deaths\nAmerican bankers\nAmerican political fundraisers\nBush family\nBusinesspeople from Maine\nBusinesspeople from Greenwich, Connecticut\nConnecticut Republicans\nMaine Republicans\nHotchkiss School alumni\nYale University alumni\nPeople from North Haven, Maine"
] |
[
"Danny Glover",
"Political activism",
"When did Glover's political activities begin?",
"I don't know.",
"What was one of his political activities?",
"Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling",
"What did he say about Bush?",
"him a known racist. \"",
"Did Bush respond?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_e2c9ab9fcb7341b0b6869c12931cafe5_0
|
Who else did Glover call out?
| 5 |
Who else did Danny Glover call out other than George Bush?
|
Danny Glover
|
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics." Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election. On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?" Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker. CANNOTANSWER
|
Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration.
|
Danny Lebern Glover (; born July 22, 1946) is an American actor, film director, and political activist. He is widely known for his lead role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film series. He also had leading roles in his films included The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, Predator 2, Angels in the Outfield, and Operation Dumbo Drop. Glover has prominent supporting roles in Silverado, Witness, A Rage in Harlem, Dreamgirls, Shooter, Death at a Funeral, Beyond the Lights, Sorry to Bother You, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Dead Don't Die, Lonesome Dove and Jumanji: The Next Level. He is also an active supporter of various political causes.
In 2021, it was announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would bestow the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Glover for his "decades-long advocacy for justice and human rights [which] reflects his dedication to recognizing our shared humanity on and off the screen".
Early life
Glover was born in San Francisco, the son of Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover. His parents, both postal workers, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to advance equal rights. Glover's mother, daughter of a midwife, was born in Louisville, Georgia and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. His father was a World War II veteran. He graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco.
As an adolescent and a young adult, Glover suffered from epilepsy but has not suffered a seizure since age 35. He attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s but did not graduate. SFSU later awarded him the Presidential Medal of San Francisco State University for his service to education. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
Career
Glover originally worked in city administration working on community development before transitioning to theater. He has said:
I didn't think it was a difficult transition. Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings—all within that realm of the capacity it represents. It may have been a leap of faith for me, given not only my learning disability (dyslexia) but also the fact that I felt awkward. I felt all the things that someone that's 6′3″ or 6′4″ feels and with my own diminished expectations of who I could be [and] would feel. Whether it's art, acting or theater that I've devoted myself to I put more passion and more energy into it.
His first theater involvement was with the American Conservatory Theater, a regional training program in San Francisco. Glover also trained with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab in San Francisco. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Glover credited Jean Shelton for much of his development as an actor. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Glover resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor. Glover then moved to Los Angeles for more opportunities in acting, where he would later go on to co-found the Robey Theatre Company with actor Ben Guillory in honor of the actor and concert singer Paul Robeson in Los Angeles in 1994.
Glover has had a variety of film, stage, and television roles, and is best known for playing Los Angeles police Sergeant Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series of action films, starring alongside Mel Gibson, and Joe Pesci. Later he once again starred with Gary Busey in the blockbuster Predator 2. He also starred as the husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in the celebrated literary adaptation The Color Purple, and as Lieutenant James McFee in the film Witness. In 1994 he made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override.
Also in 1994, Glover and actor Ben Guillory founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, focusing on theatre by and about black people. During his career, he has made several cameos, appearing, for example, in the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl" of 1987. Glover earned top billing for the first time in Predator 2, the sequel to the science fiction action film Predator. That same year he starred in Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
In common with Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have played Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe, Glover played the role in the episode "Red Wind" of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels. In 1997, under his former production company banner Carrie Films, Glover executive produced numerous films of first time directors including Pamm Malveaux's neo-noir short film Final Act starring Joe Morton, which aired on the Independent Film Channel. In addition, Glover has been a voice actor in many children's movies. Glover was featured in the popular 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson.
In 2004, he appeared in the low-budget horror film Saw as Detective David Tapp. In 2005, Glover and Joslyn Barnes announced plans to make No FEAR, a film about Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's experience. Coleman-Adebayo won a 2000 jury trial against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The jury found the EPA guilty of violating the civil rights of Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race, sex, color, and a hostile work environment, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman-Adebayo was terminated shortly after she revealed the environmental and human disaster taking place in the Brits, South Africa, vanadium mines. Her experience inspired the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No-FEAR Act). the No Fear title has not appeared but The Marsha Coleman-Adebayo Story was announced as the next major project of No Fear Media Productions.
Glover portrayed David Keaton in the film The Exonerated—a real-life story of Keaton's experience of being arrested, jailed, and then freed from death row.
In 2009, Glover performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Glover played President Wilson, the President of the United States in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in theaters November 13, 2009. In 2010, Glover participated in a Spanish film called I Want to Be a Soldier. In 2012, he starred in the film Donovan's Echo.
Glover co-starred in the science fiction comedy film Sorry to Bother You, which was released in theaters on July 6, 2018.
Planned directorial debut
Glover sought to make a film biography of Toussaint Louverture for his directorial debut. In May 2006, the film had included cast members Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Guenveur Smith, Mos Def, Isaach de Bankolé, and Richard Bohringer. Production, estimated to cost $30 million, was planned to begin in Poland, filming from late 2006 into early 2007. In May 2007, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez contributed $18 million to fund the production of Toussaint for Glover, who was a prominent U.S. supporter of Chávez. The contribution annoyed some Venezuelan filmmakers, who said the money could have funded other homegrown films and that Glover's film was not even about Venezuela. In April 2008, the Venezuelan National Assembly authorized an additional $9,840,505 for Glover's film, which is still in planning. In 2015, Glover gave an update on the Toussaint project, stating, "The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me."
Public appearances
Glover appeared at London Film and Comic Con 2013 at Earls Court 2 over 2.5 days during Friday 5th to Sunday, July 7. He participated in a panel discussion in McComb, Mississippi on July 16, 2015. The event, co-sponsored by The Gloster Project and Jubilee Performing Arts Center, included noted authors Terry McMillan and Quincy Troupe.
On January 30, 2015, Glover was the Keynote Speaker and 2015 Honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Glover used his career and personal story to speak on the topic "Creativity and Democracy: Social Change through the Arts". At the University of the Virgin Islands, Glover gave a speech that encouraged the graduates in their upcoming journey.
It was announced in July 2018 that Glover will be the featured guest at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State.
Personal life
Glover married Asake Bomani in 1975 and they have a daughter, Mandisa, born in 1976. Glover and Bomani divorced in 2000. Glover married Eliane Cavalleiro in 2009.
Glover purchased a house in Dunthorpe, Oregon, in 1999. As of 2011, he no longer lives in Oregon.
On April 16, 2010, Glover was arrested in Maryland during a protest by SEIU workers for Sodexo's alleged unfair and illegal treatment of workers. He was given a citation and later released. The Associated Press reports "Glover and others stepped past yellow police tape and were asked to step back three times at Sodexo headquarters. When they refused, officers arrested them."
Glover is a Babalawo.
Activism
Civil rights activism
While attending San Francisco State University (SFSU), Glover was a member of the Black Students' Union, which, along with the Third World Liberation Front and the American Federation of Teachers, collaborated in a five-month student-led strike to establish a Department of Black Studies. The strike was the longest student walkout in U.S. history. It helped create not only the first Department of Black Studies but also the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States.
Hari Dillon, current president of the Vanguard Public Foundation, was a fellow striker at SFSU. Glover later co-chaired Vanguard's board. He is also a board member of the Algebra Project, the Black AIDS Institute, Walden House and Cheryl Byron's Something Positive Dance Group. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly after being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during a protest over Sudan's humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
In 1999, he used his leverage as a former San Francisco cab driver to raise awareness about African Americans being passed over for white passengers. In response, Rudolph Giuliani launched Operation Refusal, which suspended the licenses of cab drivers who favored white passengers over black ones.
Glover's long history of union activism includes support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, and numerous service unions. In March 2010, Glover supported 375 Union workers in Ohio by calling upon all actors at the 2010 Academy Awards to boycott Hugo Boss suits following announcement of Hugo Boss's decision to close a manufacturing plant in Ohio after a proposed pay decrease from $13 to $8.30 an hour was rejected by the Workers United Union.
On November 1, 2011, Glover spoke to the crowd at Occupy Oakland on the day before the Oakland General Strike where thousands of protestors shut down the Port of Oakland.
Political activism
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In February 2019, Glover again endorsed Sanders for US president in 2020.
In 2017, he co-authored a petition along with Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Nancy Fraser, Oliver Stone and Eve Ensler, urging French citizens to vote for candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 presidential election.
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics."
Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election.
On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?"
Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker.
International
Africa
Glover is an active board member of the TransAfrica Forum. On April 6, 2009, Glover was given a chieftaincy title in Imo State, Nigeria. His title, "Enyioma of Nkwerre", means A Good Friend in the language of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.
Brazil
In 2018, Glover, as the UN Goodwill Ambassador, met with Lula to express solidarity and support for his presidential candidacy. During a trip to Brazil, he also met with the family of Marielle Franco, the City Council member and LGBT activist murdered in Rio de Janeiro.
Caribbean and Haiti
On January 13, 2010, Glover compared the scale and devastation of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the predicament other island nations may face as a result of the failed Copenhagen summit the previous year. Glover said: "the threat of what happens to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations ... they're all in peril because of global warming ... because of climate change ... when we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens". In the same statement, he called for a new form of international partnership with Haiti and other Caribbean nations and praised Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, for already accepting this partnership.
Iraq War
Danny Glover had been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War before the war began in March 2003. In February 2003, he was one of the featured speakers at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco where other notable speakers included names such as author Alice Walker, singer Joan Baez, United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.
Glover was a signatory to the April 2003 anti-war letter "To the Conscience of the World" that criticized the unilateral American invasion of Iraq that led to "massive loss of civilian life" and "devastation of one of the cultural patrimonies of humanity".
During an anti-war demonstration in Downtown Oakland in March 2003, Glover praised the community leaders for their anti-war efforts saying that "They're on the front lines because they are trying to make a better America. ... The world has come together and said 'no' to this war – and we must stand with them."
Venezuela
In January 2006, Harry Belafonte led a delegation of activists, including Glover, activist/professor Cornel West, and activist/Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Founder and Executive Director Daniel NANE Alejandrez in a meeting with President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez. In 2006, Glover had begun working on a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led the 18th century revolt in Haiti and, it was reported, that Chavez supported the film, "hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression." In 2007, Glover agreed with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that the Touissant Louverture film would be financed by Venezuela. On May 19, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela approved giving Glover $18,000,000 for the film. The following year, on April 9, 2008, the National Assembly of Venezuela, at the request of the Chávez, approved another $9,000,000 to be handed to Glover in order to "continue" the filming of the film about Touissant. Surprisingly, in an interview dated January 5, 2015, published in Filmmaker magazine, Glover says, “The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me”. As of 2015, the film had not been made.
Glover was also a board member of TeleSUR, a media network primarily funded by the Venezuelan government. During the beginning of the 2014 Venezuela Protests, Glover shared his support to Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, calling members of his government "the stewards" of Venezuela's democracy. Glover also told Venezuelan government supporters to go fight for the sovereignty of Maduro's government. Through the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Glover continued to show his support for the Bolivarian government and President Maduro's administration.
Israel
On September 2, 2009, Glover signed an open letter of objection to the inclusion of a series of films intended to showcase Tel Aviv—without the participation of Palestinian filmmakers, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Music
Glover has become an active member of board of directors of The Jazz Foundation of America. He became involved with The Jazz Foundation in 2005, and has been a featured host for their annual benefit A Great Night in Harlem for several years, as well appearing as a celebrity MC at other events for the foundation. In 2006, Britain's leading African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi appointed Glover as one of its three Patrons, joining Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jocelyn Jee Esien opening the organization's tenth-anniversary celebrations (February 2, 2008) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
Filmography
Awards and honours
In 2010, Glover delivered the Commencement Address and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Utah State University. The same year, Starr King School for the Ministry awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters in absentia. He was awarded the doctorate specifically for his long history of activism, including support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, The Algebra Project, The Black AIDS Institute, as well as his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Haiti earthquake victims, literacy and civil rights and his fight against unjust labor practices.
He was also the recipient of a tribute paid by the Deauville American Film Festival in France on September 7, 2011.
Glover was awarded the Cuban National Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Council of State on December 29, 2016 in a ceremony in Havana for his solidarity with the Cuban 5 during their time of incarceration in the United States.
See also
List of peace activists
References
External links
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
Activists from California
African-American activists
African-American film directors
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American television producers
American anti-war activists
American civil rights activists
American Conservatory Theater alumni
American film producers
American humanitarians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
American political activists
Audiobook narrators
Center for Economic and Policy Research
City College of San Francisco alumni
Film directors from San Francisco
Film producers from California
Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Male actors from California
Male actors from Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
People from Dunthorpe, Oregon
People with dyslexia
People with epilepsy
San Francisco State University alumni
Television producers from California
Television producers from Oregon
| true |
[
"Snapshot is the fourth solo album by Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover released in September 2002 by Eagle Records. It features Randall Bramblett, Warren Haynes and Gillian Glover (Roger's daughter). It is credited to Roger Glover & The Guilty Party.\n\nTrack listing\nAll songs written by Roger Glover and Randall Bramblett, except where noted.\n\"My Turn\" (Glover) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"Burn Me Up Slowly\" (Glover) - Vocals by Roger Glover\n\"Beyond Emily\" - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"Queen Of England\" (Bramblett) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"No Place To Go\" (Glover) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"The Bargain Basement\" (Glover) - Vocals by Gillian Glover\n\"What You Don't Say\" - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"Nothing Else\" (Glover) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"Could Have Been Me\" (Glover) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"The More I Find\" (Glover) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"When It Comes To You\" - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"Some Hope\" - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"If I Could Fly\" (Glover) - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\"It's Only Life\" - Vocals by Randall Bramblett\n\nPersonnel\nRoger Glover: Bass guitar, Guitar, Vocals and Piano.\nRandall Bramblett: Lead Vocals, Keyboards, Organ Hammond and Saxophone.\nJoe Bonadio: Drums and percussion.\nNick Moroch: Guitar.\nEran Tabib: Slide Guitar.\nJoe Mennona: Horns.\nLarry Saltzman: Guitar.\nWarren Haynes: Guitar.\nGerry Leonard: Guitar.\nMickey Lee Soule: Piano.\nGillian Glover: Vocals.\nVaneese Thomas: Background vocals.\nDeena Miller: Background vocals.\n\nProduction notes \nEngineered by Peter Denenberg.\nMixed by Peter Denenberg and Roger Glover at Acme Studios, Mamaroneck, New York.\nSecond engineer/programming: Michael Messier, Rory Young.\nAssistant engineer: Jim Albert.\nMastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound, New York. Art direction and design: Roger Glover.\nLayout: Diane Murphy.\n1950 photograph of Roger Glover: Norman Glover.\n\nExternal links \n Roger-Glover.com\n\n2002 albums",
"Victor Jerome Glover (born April 30, 1976) is a NASA astronaut of the class of 2013 and Pilot on the first operational flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon to the International Space Station. Glover is a commander in the U.S. Navy where he pilots an F/A-18, and is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. He was a crew member of Expedition 64, and served as a station systems flight engineer.\n\nPersonal life \n\nGlover grew up in Pomona, California, and graduated from Ontario High School in 1994, where he was a quarterback and running back for the Jaguars, and was a recipient of the 1994 Athlete of the Year Award. He attended California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, and received a Bachelor of Science in General Engineering in 1999. While at Cal Poly, Glover became a member of the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity.\n\nIn addition to his undergraduate education, Glover holds a Master of Science in Flight Test Engineering from Air University (United States Air Force), a Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a Master of Military Operational Art and Science, also from Air University.\nGlover also holds a Certificate in Space Systems from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a Certificate in Legislative Studies from Georgetown University.\n\nHe is married to Dionna Odom Glover and they have four daughters.\n\nMilitary career\nGlover was commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy in 1999. He attended primary flight training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, earning his aviator wings in 2001. He later trained on the F/A-18C Hornet with VMFAT-101 at MCAS Miramar, California. In 2003, he was assigned to VFA-34, based out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia. With VFA-34, he embarked on the final deployment of the USS John F. Kennedy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In June 2006, Glover was selected to attend the United States Air Force Test Pilot School. Following graduation in June 2007, he was designated a test pilot and began his developmental test tour with VX-31, based out of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California. In 2011, he was assigned to VFA-195 for his department head tour. Stationed at Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Japan, VFA-195 embarked on the USS George Washington in support of maritime operations in the Western Pacific Ocean. At the time of his selection in 2013, Glover was assigned to the personal staff of John McCain as a legislative fellow in Washington, D.C.\n\nDuring his career, Glover has accumulated 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, and has completed over 400 carrier arrested landings and 24 combat missions. Glover's call-sign is \"Ike”, a name given to him by one of his first commanding officers, standing for \"I Know Everything\".\n\nNASA career\n\nGlover was introduced as one of the Astronaut Group 21 team in June 2013, completing training in 2015.\n\nExpedition 64/65\nIn August 2018 Glover was introduced as one of the Commercial Crew astronauts, assigned to fly on the first operational flight, and the second crewed flight overall, of SpaceX's Crew Dragon. As part of that mission, he will be a crew member on ISS Expeditions 64 and 65 for more than six months. Glover is the first African American ISS Expedition crewmember to live on the ISS, not only visit the ISS for a short stay like on the Space Shuttle as an ISS assembly astronaut. According to The New York Times:\nMr. Glover's achievement is notable for NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \"hidden figures\" in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space out of a total of more than 300 NASA astronauts. He will not be the first Black astronaut aboard the station. But those who preceded him from NASA were members of space shuttle crews during the station’s construction and only made brief stays on the outpost. \n\nSpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Resilience launched on November 15, 2020, carrying Glover together with two other NASA astronauts (Michael S. Hopkins and Shannon Walker) as well as Soichi Noguchi of Japan. They arrived at the space station on November 17. During his stay on the ISS, Glover was selected for NASA's Artemis program which is set to have its first uncrewed launch in Spring 2022.\n\nGlover's first spacewalk, which lasted for more than six hours on January 27, 2021, was a team effort with Hopkins as they worked to upgrade the Columbus module. On his second spacewalk, also with Hopkins, Glover replaced a broken external camera. On Glover's third spacewalk, he and Kate Rubins began work to upgrade the station power supply with hardware in preparation for installation of new solar arrays. \n \nOn February 24, 2021, NASA recorded a video call from Vice President Kamala Harris to Glover, in the space station. According to NASA, \"the conversation ranged from the legacy of human spaceflight to observing Earth from the vantage of the space station, Glover’s history-making stay aboard the orbiting laboratory, and preparing for missions from the Moon to Mars.\"\n\nGallery\n\nBibliography\n\nSee also\n List of African-American astronauts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n NASA Astronaut Bio\n Victor Glover on Twitter\n Video call from Vice President Kamala Harris to Victor Glover in the space station (NASA, February 24, 2021) \n\nLiving people\nAir University (United States Air Force) alumni\nAmerican astronauts\nAmerican aviators\nCalifornia Polytechnic State University alumni\nNaval Postgraduate School alumni\nPeople from Pomona, California\nPeople from Prosper, Texas\nU.S. Air Force Test Pilot School alumni\n1976 births\nSpaceX astronauts\nSpacewalkers"
] |
[
"Danny Glover",
"Political activism",
"When did Glover's political activities begin?",
"I don't know.",
"What was one of his political activities?",
"Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling",
"What did he say about Bush?",
"him a known racist. \"",
"Did Bush respond?",
"I don't know.",
"Who else did Glover call out?",
"Glover said: \"I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration."
] |
C_e2c9ab9fcb7341b0b6869c12931cafe5_0
|
Did the Obama administration respond?
| 6 |
Did the Obama administration respond to Danny Glover's comments about the Obama administration?
|
Danny Glover
|
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics." Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election. On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?" Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Danny Lebern Glover (; born July 22, 1946) is an American actor, film director, and political activist. He is widely known for his lead role as Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film series. He also had leading roles in his films included The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, Predator 2, Angels in the Outfield, and Operation Dumbo Drop. Glover has prominent supporting roles in Silverado, Witness, A Rage in Harlem, Dreamgirls, Shooter, Death at a Funeral, Beyond the Lights, Sorry to Bother You, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Dead Don't Die, Lonesome Dove and Jumanji: The Next Level. He is also an active supporter of various political causes.
In 2021, it was announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would bestow the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Glover for his "decades-long advocacy for justice and human rights [which] reflects his dedication to recognizing our shared humanity on and off the screen".
Early life
Glover was born in San Francisco, the son of Carrie (Hunley) and James Glover. His parents, both postal workers, were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working to advance equal rights. Glover's mother, daughter of a midwife, was born in Louisville, Georgia and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. His father was a World War II veteran. He graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco.
As an adolescent and a young adult, Glover suffered from epilepsy but has not suffered a seizure since age 35. He attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the late 1960s but did not graduate. SFSU later awarded him the Presidential Medal of San Francisco State University for his service to education. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.
Career
Glover originally worked in city administration working on community development before transitioning to theater. He has said:
I didn't think it was a difficult transition. Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings—all within that realm of the capacity it represents. It may have been a leap of faith for me, given not only my learning disability (dyslexia) but also the fact that I felt awkward. I felt all the things that someone that's 6′3″ or 6′4″ feels and with my own diminished expectations of who I could be [and] would feel. Whether it's art, acting or theater that I've devoted myself to I put more passion and more energy into it.
His first theater involvement was with the American Conservatory Theater, a regional training program in San Francisco. Glover also trained with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab in San Francisco. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Glover credited Jean Shelton for much of his development as an actor. Deciding that he wanted to be an actor, Glover resigned from his city administration job and soon began his career as a stage actor. Glover then moved to Los Angeles for more opportunities in acting, where he would later go on to co-found the Robey Theatre Company with actor Ben Guillory in honor of the actor and concert singer Paul Robeson in Los Angeles in 1994.
Glover has had a variety of film, stage, and television roles, and is best known for playing Los Angeles police Sergeant Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series of action films, starring alongside Mel Gibson, and Joe Pesci. Later he once again starred with Gary Busey in the blockbuster Predator 2. He also starred as the husband to Whoopi Goldberg's character Celie in the celebrated literary adaptation The Color Purple, and as Lieutenant James McFee in the film Witness. In 1994 he made his directorial debut with the Showtime channel short film Override.
Also in 1994, Glover and actor Ben Guillory founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles, focusing on theatre by and about black people. During his career, he has made several cameos, appearing, for example, in the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl" of 1987. Glover earned top billing for the first time in Predator 2, the sequel to the science fiction action film Predator. That same year he starred in Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
In common with Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould, and Robert Mitchum, who have played Raymond Chandler's private eye detective Philip Marlowe, Glover played the role in the episode "Red Wind" of the Showtime network's 1995 series Fallen Angels. In 1997, under his former production company banner Carrie Films, Glover executive produced numerous films of first time directors including Pamm Malveaux's neo-noir short film Final Act starring Joe Morton, which aired on the Independent Film Channel. In addition, Glover has been a voice actor in many children's movies. Glover was featured in the popular 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson.
In 2004, he appeared in the low-budget horror film Saw as Detective David Tapp. In 2005, Glover and Joslyn Barnes announced plans to make No FEAR, a film about Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's experience. Coleman-Adebayo won a 2000 jury trial against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The jury found the EPA guilty of violating the civil rights of Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race, sex, color, and a hostile work environment, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman-Adebayo was terminated shortly after she revealed the environmental and human disaster taking place in the Brits, South Africa, vanadium mines. Her experience inspired the passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No-FEAR Act). the No Fear title has not appeared but The Marsha Coleman-Adebayo Story was announced as the next major project of No Fear Media Productions.
Glover portrayed David Keaton in the film The Exonerated—a real-life story of Keaton's experience of being arrested, jailed, and then freed from death row.
In 2009, Glover performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Glover played President Wilson, the President of the United States in 2012, a disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and released in theaters November 13, 2009. In 2010, Glover participated in a Spanish film called I Want to Be a Soldier. In 2012, he starred in the film Donovan's Echo.
Glover co-starred in the science fiction comedy film Sorry to Bother You, which was released in theaters on July 6, 2018.
Planned directorial debut
Glover sought to make a film biography of Toussaint Louverture for his directorial debut. In May 2006, the film had included cast members Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Don Cheadle, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Roger Guenveur Smith, Mos Def, Isaach de Bankolé, and Richard Bohringer. Production, estimated to cost $30 million, was planned to begin in Poland, filming from late 2006 into early 2007. In May 2007, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez contributed $18 million to fund the production of Toussaint for Glover, who was a prominent U.S. supporter of Chávez. The contribution annoyed some Venezuelan filmmakers, who said the money could have funded other homegrown films and that Glover's film was not even about Venezuela. In April 2008, the Venezuelan National Assembly authorized an additional $9,840,505 for Glover's film, which is still in planning. In 2015, Glover gave an update on the Toussaint project, stating, "The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me."
Public appearances
Glover appeared at London Film and Comic Con 2013 at Earls Court 2 over 2.5 days during Friday 5th to Sunday, July 7. He participated in a panel discussion in McComb, Mississippi on July 16, 2015. The event, co-sponsored by The Gloster Project and Jubilee Performing Arts Center, included noted authors Terry McMillan and Quincy Troupe.
On January 30, 2015, Glover was the Keynote Speaker and 2015 Honoree for the MLK Celebration Series at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Glover used his career and personal story to speak on the topic "Creativity and Democracy: Social Change through the Arts". At the University of the Virgin Islands, Glover gave a speech that encouraged the graduates in their upcoming journey.
It was announced in July 2018 that Glover will be the featured guest at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State.
Personal life
Glover married Asake Bomani in 1975 and they have a daughter, Mandisa, born in 1976. Glover and Bomani divorced in 2000. Glover married Eliane Cavalleiro in 2009.
Glover purchased a house in Dunthorpe, Oregon, in 1999. As of 2011, he no longer lives in Oregon.
On April 16, 2010, Glover was arrested in Maryland during a protest by SEIU workers for Sodexo's alleged unfair and illegal treatment of workers. He was given a citation and later released. The Associated Press reports "Glover and others stepped past yellow police tape and were asked to step back three times at Sodexo headquarters. When they refused, officers arrested them."
Glover is a Babalawo.
Activism
Civil rights activism
While attending San Francisco State University (SFSU), Glover was a member of the Black Students' Union, which, along with the Third World Liberation Front and the American Federation of Teachers, collaborated in a five-month student-led strike to establish a Department of Black Studies. The strike was the longest student walkout in U.S. history. It helped create not only the first Department of Black Studies but also the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States.
Hari Dillon, current president of the Vanguard Public Foundation, was a fellow striker at SFSU. Glover later co-chaired Vanguard's board. He is also a board member of the Algebra Project, the Black AIDS Institute, Walden House and Cheryl Byron's Something Positive Dance Group. He was charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly after being arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during a protest over Sudan's humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
In 1999, he used his leverage as a former San Francisco cab driver to raise awareness about African Americans being passed over for white passengers. In response, Rudolph Giuliani launched Operation Refusal, which suspended the licenses of cab drivers who favored white passengers over black ones.
Glover's long history of union activism includes support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, and numerous service unions. In March 2010, Glover supported 375 Union workers in Ohio by calling upon all actors at the 2010 Academy Awards to boycott Hugo Boss suits following announcement of Hugo Boss's decision to close a manufacturing plant in Ohio after a proposed pay decrease from $13 to $8.30 an hour was rejected by the Workers United Union.
On November 1, 2011, Glover spoke to the crowd at Occupy Oakland on the day before the Oakland General Strike where thousands of protestors shut down the Port of Oakland.
Political activism
Glover was an early supporter of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries until Edwards' withdrawal, although some news reports indicated that he had endorsed Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whom he had endorsed in 2004. After Edwards dropped out, Glover then endorsed Barack Obama. In February 2016, Glover endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In February 2019, Glover again endorsed Sanders for US president in 2020.
In 2017, he co-authored a petition along with Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Nancy Fraser, Oliver Stone and Eve Ensler, urging French citizens to vote for candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2017 presidential election.
Glover was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, calling him a known racist. "Yes, he's racist. We all knew that. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died were Afro-Americans or Hispanics."
Glover's support of California Proposition 7 (2008) led him to use his voice in an automated phone call to generate support for the measure before the election.
On the foreign policy of the Obama administration, Glover said: "I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different... On the domestic side, look here: What's so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street? He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black, and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman.... But what choices do they have within the structure?"
Glover wrote the foreword to Phyllis Bennis' book, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power. Glover is also a member of the board of directors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank led by economist Dean Baker.
International
Africa
Glover is an active board member of the TransAfrica Forum. On April 6, 2009, Glover was given a chieftaincy title in Imo State, Nigeria. His title, "Enyioma of Nkwerre", means A Good Friend in the language of the Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.
Brazil
In 2018, Glover, as the UN Goodwill Ambassador, met with Lula to express solidarity and support for his presidential candidacy. During a trip to Brazil, he also met with the family of Marielle Franco, the City Council member and LGBT activist murdered in Rio de Janeiro.
Caribbean and Haiti
On January 13, 2010, Glover compared the scale and devastation of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the predicament other island nations may face as a result of the failed Copenhagen summit the previous year. Glover said: "the threat of what happens to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations ... they're all in peril because of global warming ... because of climate change ... when we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens". In the same statement, he called for a new form of international partnership with Haiti and other Caribbean nations and praised Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, for already accepting this partnership.
Iraq War
Danny Glover had been an outspoken critic of the Iraq War before the war began in March 2003. In February 2003, he was one of the featured speakers at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco where other notable speakers included names such as author Alice Walker, singer Joan Baez, United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.
Glover was a signatory to the April 2003 anti-war letter "To the Conscience of the World" that criticized the unilateral American invasion of Iraq that led to "massive loss of civilian life" and "devastation of one of the cultural patrimonies of humanity".
During an anti-war demonstration in Downtown Oakland in March 2003, Glover praised the community leaders for their anti-war efforts saying that "They're on the front lines because they are trying to make a better America. ... The world has come together and said 'no' to this war – and we must stand with them."
Venezuela
In January 2006, Harry Belafonte led a delegation of activists, including Glover, activist/professor Cornel West, and activist/Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Founder and Executive Director Daniel NANE Alejandrez in a meeting with President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez. In 2006, Glover had begun working on a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led the 18th century revolt in Haiti and, it was reported, that Chavez supported the film, "hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression." In 2007, Glover agreed with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that the Touissant Louverture film would be financed by Venezuela. On May 19, 2007, the National Assembly of Venezuela approved giving Glover $18,000,000 for the film. The following year, on April 9, 2008, the National Assembly of Venezuela, at the request of the Chávez, approved another $9,000,000 to be handed to Glover in order to "continue" the filming of the film about Touissant. Surprisingly, in an interview dated January 5, 2015, published in Filmmaker magazine, Glover says, “The film that we always missed is a movie on the Haitian revolution and Toussaint Louverture. The company is fortuitously named after him and that was the movie that I wanted to do. We’ve developed a script. We thought we were going to get it done four years ago. We thought we were going to be making it right now. But also there are other kinds of things that intrigue me”. As of 2015, the film had not been made.
Glover was also a board member of TeleSUR, a media network primarily funded by the Venezuelan government. During the beginning of the 2014 Venezuela Protests, Glover shared his support to Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, calling members of his government "the stewards" of Venezuela's democracy. Glover also told Venezuelan government supporters to go fight for the sovereignty of Maduro's government. Through the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Glover continued to show his support for the Bolivarian government and President Maduro's administration.
Israel
On September 2, 2009, Glover signed an open letter of objection to the inclusion of a series of films intended to showcase Tel Aviv—without the participation of Palestinian filmmakers, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Music
Glover has become an active member of board of directors of The Jazz Foundation of America. He became involved with The Jazz Foundation in 2005, and has been a featured host for their annual benefit A Great Night in Harlem for several years, as well appearing as a celebrity MC at other events for the foundation. In 2006, Britain's leading African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi appointed Glover as one of its three Patrons, joining Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jocelyn Jee Esien opening the organization's tenth-anniversary celebrations (February 2, 2008) at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
Filmography
Awards and honours
In 2010, Glover delivered the Commencement Address and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Utah State University. The same year, Starr King School for the Ministry awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters in absentia. He was awarded the doctorate specifically for his long history of activism, including support for the United Farm Workers, UNITE HERE, The Algebra Project, The Black AIDS Institute, as well as his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Haiti earthquake victims, literacy and civil rights and his fight against unjust labor practices.
He was also the recipient of a tribute paid by the Deauville American Film Festival in France on September 7, 2011.
Glover was awarded the Cuban National Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Council of State on December 29, 2016 in a ceremony in Havana for his solidarity with the Cuban 5 during their time of incarceration in the United States.
See also
List of peace activists
References
External links
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
Activists from California
African-American activists
African-American film directors
African-American film producers
African-American male actors
African-American television producers
American anti-war activists
American civil rights activists
American Conservatory Theater alumni
American film producers
American humanitarians
American male film actors
American male television actors
American male video game actors
American male voice actors
American political activists
Audiobook narrators
Center for Economic and Policy Research
City College of San Francisco alumni
Film directors from San Francisco
Film producers from California
Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead winners
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winners
Male actors from California
Male actors from Oregon
Male actors from San Francisco
People from Dunthorpe, Oregon
People with dyslexia
People with epilepsy
San Francisco State University alumni
Television producers from California
Television producers from Oregon
| false |
[
"During the presidency of Barack Obama, the government eased enforcement of federal marijuana laws in U.S. states permitting cannabis use.\n\nContrastingly, Time reported in 2012, \"Two years [after his first year in office], the Obama Administration is cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries and growers just as harshly as the Administration of George W. Bush did.\"\n\nAccording to Jessica Bulman-Pozen and Gillian E. Metzger in 2016, \"in declining to enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act with respect to marijuana offenses in Colorado and Washington, the [Obama] Administration has accommodated those states’ decisions to legalize recreational marijuana use.\"\n\nSee also\n Cole Memorandum\n Eric Holder, served as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States from 2009 to 2015\n Michele Leonhart, former Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration\n Political positions of Barack Obama\n\nReferences\n\nObama\nPresidency of Barack Obama",
"The Yemen Model was the rubric for the Obama Administration's attempts to neutralize foreign terrorist groups hostile to the United States.\n\nStrategy\nUS President Barack Obama often cited the Yemen Model as his vision for dealing with insurgent groups.\n\nUnder the Yemen Model, the United States provided weapons, logistics, transportation and cash to a local proxy force, while committing no or few US troops. The United States also carried out air strikes and targeted killings of suspected opposition leaders.\n\nNaming\n\nThe model was named after the conduct of the United States' continuing conflict in Yemen. The US wanted to minimize the ability of the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula group to attack US territory, while at the same time, the Obama Administration wanted to commit as few resources to the fight as possible.\n\nThe United States picked a proxy force (in this case, tribes allied with government leader Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi), armed and trained them, and used them as a ground force against Al-Qaeda factions in exchange for US aid to the regime, totaling more than $600 million. The United States also conducted a significant low-tempo air and drone campaign starting in 2009. The US also occasionally launched commando raids inside Yemen and did base some military personnel in and around al-Annad air base in the south of the country.\n\nThe Obama Administration often defended its actions in Yemen as effective, and a model for other conflicts.\n\nOther American conflicts\nDuring the early stages of the current American conflict in Iraq, Obama cited the Yemen Model as the inspiration for the conduct of the war. He went so far as to mention Yemen as a model for success during his first speech about the new war in September 2014.\n\nThe Administration also defended its efforts in Somalia as an outgrowth of the strategy.\n\nSee also\n Obama Administration position on combat drones\n\nReferences\n\nForeign policy of the Barack Obama administration\nObama Administration initiatives\nWar on terror\nCounterinsurgency"
] |
[
"Raymond Burr",
"Radio"
] |
C_ce9c0a6e58fb4956a7b1aa750ba1c994_0
|
what did he do on the radio
| 1 |
what did Raymond Burr do on the radio
|
Raymond Burr
|
As a young man Burr weighed more than 300 lbs., which limited his on-screen roles. "But in radio this presented no problems, given the magnificent quality of his voice," reported The Globe and Mail. "He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income." Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast. He had a regular role in Jack Webb's first radio show, Pat Novak for Hire (1949), and in Dragnet (1949-50) he played Joe Friday's boss, Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives. Burr worked on other Los Angeles-based series including Suspense, Screen Directors Playhouse, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Family Theater, Hallmark Playhouse and Hallmark Hall of Fame. He performed in five episodes of the experimental dramatic radio anthology series CBS Radio Workshop, and had what is arguably his best radio role in "The Silent Witness" (1957), in which his is the only voice. In 1956 Burr was the star of CBS Radio's Fort Laramie, an adult Western drama produced, written and directed by the creators of Gunsmoke. He played the role of Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry, in the series set at a post-Civil War military post where disease, boredom, the elements and the uncharted terrain were the greatest enemies of "ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times". The half-hour transcribed program aired Sundays at 5:30 p.m. ET January 22 - October 28, 1956. Burr told columnist Sheilah Graham that he had received 1,500 fan letters after the first broadcasts, and he continued to receive letters praising the show's authenticity and presentation of human dignity. In August 1956, CBS announced that Burr would star in the television series Perry Mason. Although the network wanted Burr to continue work on Fort Laramie as well, the TV series required an extraordinary commitment and the radio show ended. Known for his loyalty and consciousness of history, Burr went out of his way to employ his radio colleagues in his television programs. Some 180 radio celebrities appeared on Perry Mason during the first season alone. CANNOTANSWER
|
He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income."
|
William Raymond Stacy Burr (May 21, 1917September 12, 1993) was a Canadian-American actor known for his lengthy Hollywood film career and his title roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.
Burr's early acting career included roles on Broadway, radio, television, and film, usually as the villain. His portrayal of the suspected murderer in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window (1954) is his best-known film role, although he is also remembered for his role in the 1956 film Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, which he reprised in the 1985 film Godzilla 1985. He won Emmy Awards for acting in 1959 and 1961 for the role of Perry Mason, which he played for nine seasons (1957–1966) and reprised in a series of 26 Perry Mason TV movies (1985–1993). His second TV series Ironside earned him six Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations.
Burr died of cancer in 1993, and his personal life came into question, as many details of his biography appeared to be unverifiable. He was ranked number 44 of the 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time by TV Guide magazine in 1996.
Early life
William Raymond Stacy Burr was born May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia. His father William Johnston Burr (1889–1985) was a hardware salesman; his mother Minerva Annette (née Smith, 1892–1974) was a pianist and music teacher.
When Burr was six, his parents divorced. His mother moved to Vallejo, California, with him and his younger siblings Geraldine and James, while his father remained in New Westminster. Burr briefly attended San Rafael Military Academy in San Rafael, California, and graduated from Berkeley High School.
In later years, Burr freely invented stories of a happy childhood – as with many other autobiographical details he provided about his life, they are not verifiable and have no evidence to support their accuracy. In 1986, he told journalist Jane Ardmore that, when he was 12 years old, his mother sent him to New Mexico for a year to work as a ranch hand. He was already his full adult height and rather large and "had fallen in with a group of college-aged kids who didn't realize how young Raymond was, and they let him tag along with them in activities and situations far too sophisticated for him to handle". He developed a passion for growing things and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps for a year in his teens. He did acting work in his teen years, making his stage debut at age 12 with a Vancouver stock company.
Theater
Burr grew up during the Great Depression and hoped to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, but he was unable to afford the tuition. By his own account, which is open to question, in 1934 he joined a repertory theatre group in Toronto that toured throughout Canada, then joined another company that toured India, Australia, and England. He briefly attended Long Beach Junior College and taught for a semester at San Jose Junior College, working nights as a radio actor and singer. Resuming the verifiable part of his autobiography, Burr began his association with the Pasadena Playhouse in 1937.
Burr moved to New York in 1940 and made his first Broadway appearance in Crazy With the Heat, a two-act musical revue produced by Kurt Kasznar that quickly folded. His first starring role on the stage came in November 1942 when he was an emergency replacement in a Pasadena Playhouse production of Quiet Wedding. He became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse drama faculty for 18 months, and he performed in some 30 plays over the years. He returned to Broadway for Patrick Hamilton's The Duke in Darkness (1944), a psychological drama set during the French Wars of Religion. His performance as the loyal friend of the imprisoned protagonist led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures.
Film
Burr appeared in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957, creating an array of villains that established him as an icon of film noir. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in ten films: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Blue Gardenia (1953), and Crime of Passion (1957). Silver described Burr's private detective in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic", a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir, in contrast with the appealing television characters for which Burr later became famous. "He tried to make you see the psychosis below the surface, even when the parts weren't huge," said film historian James Ursini. "He was able to bring such complexity and different levels to those characters, and create sympathy for his characters even though they were doing reprehensible things."
Other titles in Burr's film noir legacy include Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), Unmasked (1950), The Whip Hand (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), Rear Window (1954), They Were So Young (1954), A Cry in the Night (1956), and Affair in Havana (1957). His villains were also seen in Westerns, period dramas, horror films, and adventure films.
"I was just a fat heavy", Burr told journalist James Bawden. "I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take one look at me and scream and can you blame them? I was drowned, beaten, stabbed and all for my art. But I knew I was horribly overweight. I lacked any kind of self esteem. At 25 I was playing the fathers of people older than me."
Burr's occasional roles on the right side of the law include the aggressive prosecutor in A Place in the Sun (1951). His courtroom performance in that film made an impression on Gail Patrick and her husband Cornwell Jackson, who had Burr in mind when they began casting the role of Los Angeles district attorney Hamilton Burger in the CBS-TV series Perry Mason.
Radio
By the age of 12, Burr was appearing in national radio dramas broadcasting in nearby San Francisco.
As a young man Burr weighed more than 300 lbs., which limited his on-screen roles. "But in radio this presented no problems, given the magnificent quality of his voice", reported The Globe and Mail. "He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income."
Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast. He had a regular role in Jack Webb's first radio show, Pat Novak for Hire (1949), and in Dragnet (1949–50) he played Joe Friday's boss, Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives. Burr worked on other Los Angeles-based series including Suspense, Screen Directors Playhouse, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Family Theater, Hallmark Playhouse and Hallmark Hall of Fame. He performed in five episodes of the experimental dramatic radio anthology series CBS Radio Workshop, and had what is arguably his best radio role in "The Silent Witness" (1957), in which his is the only voice.
In 1956 Burr was the star of CBS Radio's Fort Laramie, an adult Western drama produced, written and directed by the creators of Gunsmoke. He played the role of Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry, in the series set at a post-Civil War military post where disease, boredom, the elements and the uncharted terrain were the greatest enemies of "ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times". The half-hour transcribed program aired Sundays at 5:30 p.m. ET January 22 – October 28, 1956. Burr told columnist Sheilah Graham that he had received 1,500 fan letters after the first broadcasts, and he continued to receive letters praising the show's authenticity and presentation of human dignity.
In August 1956, CBS announced that Burr would star in the television series Perry Mason. Although the network wanted Burr to continue work on Fort Laramie as well, the TV series required an extraordinary commitment and the radio show ended.
Known for his loyalty and consciousness of history, Burr went out of his way to employ his radio colleagues in his television programs. Some 180 radio celebrities appeared on Perry Mason during the first season alone.
Television
Burr emerged as a prolific television character actor in the 1950s. He made his television debut in 1951, appearing in episodes of Stars Over Hollywood, The Bigelow Theatre, Family Theater and the debut episode of Dragnet. He went on to appear in such programs as Gruen Playhouse, Four Star Playhouse, Ford Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, Mr. and Mrs. North, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars and Playhouse 90.
Perry Mason
In 1956, Burr auditioned for the role of District Attorney Hamilton Burger in Perry Mason, a new CBS-TV courtroom drama based on the highly successful novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. Executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson had been impressed with Burr's courtroom performance in A Place in the Sun (1951), and she told Burr that he was perfect for Perry Mason but at least overweight. He went on a crash diet over the following month; he then tested as Perry Mason and was cast in the role. While Burr's test was running, Gardner reportedly stood up, pointed at the screen, and said, "That's Perry Mason." William Hopper also auditioned as Mason, but he was cast instead as private detective Paul Drake. The series also starred Barbara Hale as Della Street, Mason's secretary, William Talman as Hamilton Burger, the district attorney who loses nearly every case to Mason, and Ray Collins as homicide detective Lieutenant Arthur Tragg.
The series ran from 1957 to 1966 and made Burr a star. In the early 1960s, the show had 30 million viewers every Saturday night and Burr received 3,000 fan letters a week. Burr received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations and won the award in 1959 and 1961 for his performance as Perry Mason. The series has been rerun in syndication ever since, and was released on DVD between 2006 and 2013. Burr's character is often said never to have lost a case, although he did lose two murder cases off-screen in early episodes of the series.
Ironside
Burr moved from CBS to Universal Studios, where he played the title role in the television drama Ironside, which ran on NBC from 1967 to 1975. In the pilot episode, San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside is paralyzed by a sniper during an attempt on his life and, after his recovery, uses a wheelchair for mobility, in the first crime drama show to star a policeman with a disability. The show earned Burr six Emmy nominations—one for the pilot and five for his work in the series—and two Golden Globe nominations.
Other series
After Ironside went off the air, NBC failed in two attempts to launch Burr as the star of a new series. In a two-hour television movie format, Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence aired in February 1976 with Burr again in the role of the lawyer who outwits the district attorney. Despite good reviews for Burr, the critical reception was poor, and NBC decided against developing it into a series.
In 1977, Burr starred in the short-lived TV series Kingston: Confidential as R.B. Kingston, a William Randolph Hearst-esque publishing magnate, owner of numerous newspapers and TV stations, who, in his spare time, solved crimes along with a group of employees. It was a critical failure that was scheduled opposite the extraordinarily popular Charlie's Angels. It was cancelled after 13 weeks.
Burr took on a shorter project next, playing an underworld boss in a six-hour miniseries, 79 Park Avenue.
One last attempt to launch a series followed on CBS. The two-hour premiere of The Jordan Chance aroused little interest.
On January 20, 1987, Burr hosted the television special that later served as the pilot for the long-running series Unsolved Mysteries.
Television films
In 1985, Burr was approached by producers Dean Hargrove and Fred Silverman to star in a made-for-TV movie, Perry Mason Returns. The same week, Burr recalled, he was asked to reprise the role he played in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), in a low-budget film that would be titled Godzilla 1985.
"When they asked me to do it a second time, I said, 'Certainly,' and everybody thought I was out of my mind," Burr told Tom Shales of The Washington Post. "But it wasn't the large sum of money. It was the fact that, first of all, I kind of liked 'Godzilla,' and where do you get the opportunity to play yourself 30 years later? So I said yes to both of them." Although Burr is best remembered for his role as Perry Mason, a devoted following continues to appreciate him as the actor that brought the Godzilla series to America.
He agreed to do the Mason movie if Barbara Hale returned to reprise her role as Della Street. Hale agreed, and when Perry Mason Returns aired in December 1985, her character became the defendant. The rest of the principal cast had died, but Hale's real-life son William Katt played the role of Paul Drake, Jr. The movie was so successful that Burr made a total of 26 Perry Mason television films before his death. Many were filmed in and around Denver, Colorado.
By 1993, when Burr signed with NBC for another season of Mason films, he was using a wheelchair full-time because of his failing health. In his final Perry Mason movie, The Case of the Killer Kiss, he was shown either sitting or standing while leaning on a table, but only once standing unsupported for a few seconds. Twelve more Mason movies were scheduled before Burr's death, including one scheduled to film the month he died.
As he had with the Perry Mason TV movies, Burr decided to do an Ironside reunion movie. The Return of Ironside aired in May 1993, reuniting the entire original cast of the 1967–75 series. Like many of the Mason movies, it was set and filmed in Denver.
Personal life
Physical characteristics
Burr said that he weighed 12.75 pounds (5.8 kg) at birth, and was chubby throughout his childhood. "When you're a little fat boy in public school, or any kind of school, you're just persecuted something awful", he said. His weight was always an issue for him in getting roles, and it became a public relations problem when Johnny Carson began making jokes about him during his Tonight Show monologues. Burr refused to appear as Carson's guest from then on, and told Us Weekly years later: "I have been asked a number of times to do his show and I won't do it. Because I like NBC. He's doing an NBC show. If I went on I'd have some things to say, not just about the bad jokes he's done about me, but bad jokes he does about everybody who can't fight back because they aren't there. And that wouldn't be good for NBC."
Family life
Burr married actress Isabella Ward (1919–2004) on January 10, 1948. They met in 1943 while she was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse where Burr was teaching. They met again in 1947 when she was in California with a theater company. They were married shortly before Burr began work on the 1948 film noir Pitfall. In May 1948, they appeared on stage together in a Pasadena Playhouse production based on the life of Paul Gauguin. They lived in the basement apartment of a large house in Hollywood that Burr shared with his mother and grandparents. The marriage ended within months, and Ward returned to her native Delaware. They divorced in 1952, and neither remarried.
In 1960, Burr met Robert Benevides, an actor and Korean War veteran, on the set of Perry Mason. Benevides gave up acting in 1963, and he became a production consultant for 21 of the Perry Mason TV movies. They owned and operated an orchid business and then a vineyard in California's Dry Creek Valley. They were domestic partners until Burr's death in 1993. Burr bequeathed his entire estate to Benevides, and Benevides renamed the Dry Creek property Raymond Burr Vineyards (reportedly against Burr's wishes) and managed it as a commercial enterprise. In 2017, the property was sold.
Although Burr had not revealed his homosexuality during his lifetime, it was reported in the press upon his death.
Biographical contradictions
At various times in his career, Burr and his managers and publicists offered spurious or unverifiable biographical details to the press and public. Burr's obituary in The New York Times states that he entered the US Navy in 1944, after The Duke in Darkness, and left in 1946, weighing almost . Although Burr may have served in the Coast Guard, reports of his service in the US Navy are false, as apparently are his statements that he sustained battle injuries at Okinawa.
Other false biographical details include years of college education at a variety of institutions, being widowed twice, a son who died young, world travel and success in high school athletics. Most of these claims were apparently accepted as fact by the press during Burr's lifetime, up until his death and by his first biographer, Ona Hill.
Burr reportedly was married at the beginning of World War II to an actress named Annette Sutherland—killed, Burr said, in the same 1943 plane crash that claimed the life of actor Leslie Howard. However, multiple sources have reported that no one by that name appears on any of the published passenger manifests from the flight. A son supposedly born during this marriage, Michael Evan, was said to have died of leukemia in 1953 at the age of ten. Another marriage purportedly took place in the early 1950s to a Laura Andrina Morgan—who died of cancer, Burr said, in 1955. Yet no evidence exists of either marriage, nor of a son's birth, other than Burr's own claims. As late as 1991, Burr stood by the account of this son's life and death. He told Parade that when he realized Michael was dying, he took him on a one-year tour of the United States. "Before my boy left, before his time was gone", he said, "I wanted him to see the beauty of his country and its people." After Burr's death, his publicist confirmed that Burr worked steadily in Hollywood throughout 1952, the year that he was supposedly touring the country with his son.
In the late 1950s, Burr was rumored to be romantically involved with Natalie Wood. Wood's agent sent her on public dates so she could be noticed by directors and producers, and so the men she dated could present themselves in public as heterosexuals. The dates helped to disguise Wood's relationship with Robert Wagner, whom she later married. Burr reportedly resented Warner Bros.' decision to promote her attachment to another gay actor, Tab Hunter, rather than him. Robert Benevides later said, "He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess."
Later accounts of Burr's life say that he hid his homosexuality to protect his career. "That was a time in Hollywood history when homosexuality was not countenanced", Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas recalled in a 2000 episode of Biography. "Ray was not a romantic star by any means, but he was a very popular figure ... If it was revealed at that time in Hollywood history it would have been very difficult for him to continue."
Arthur Marks, a producer of Perry Mason, recalled Burr's talk of wives and children: "I know he was just putting on a show. ... That was my gut feeling. I think the wives and the loving women, the Natalie Wood thing, were a bit of a cover." Dean Hargrove, executive producer of the Perry Mason TV films, said in 2006, "I had always assumed that Raymond was gay, because he had a relationship with Robert Benevides for a very long time. Whether or not he had relationships with women, I had no idea. I did know that I had trouble keeping track of whether he was married or not in these stories. Raymond had the ability to mythologize himself, to some extent, and some of his stories about his past ... tended to grow as time went by."
Hobbies and businesses
Burr had many hobbies over the course of his life: cultivating orchids and collecting wine, art, stamps, and seashells. He was very fond of cooking. He was interested in flying, sailing, and fishing. According to A&E Biography, Burr was an avid reader with a retentive memory. He was also among the earliest importers and breeders of Portuguese water dogs in the United States.
Burr developed his interest in cultivating and hybridizing orchids into a business with Benevides. Over 20 years, their company, Sea God Nurseries, had nurseries in Fiji, Hawaii, the Azores, and California, and was responsible for adding more than 1,500 new orchids to the worldwide catalog. Burr named one of them the "Barbara Hale Orchid" after his Perry Mason costar. Burr and Benevides cultivated Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and grapes for Port wine, as well as orchids, at Burr's farmland holdings in Sonoma County, California.
In 1965, Burr purchased Naitauba, a island in Fiji, rich in seashells. There, he and Benevides oversaw the raising of copra (coconut meat) and cattle, as well as orchids. Burr planned to retire there permanently. However, medical problems made that impossible and he sold the property in 1983.
Philanthropy
Burr was a well-known philanthropist. He gave enormous sums of money, including his salaries from the Perry Mason movies, to charity. He was also known for sharing his wealth with friends. He sponsored 26 foster children through the Foster Parents' Plan or Save The Children, many with the greatest medical needs. He gave money and some of his Perry Mason scripts to the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California.
Burr was an early supporter of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, raising funds and chairing its first capital campaign. He donated a large collection of Fijian cowries and cones from his island in Fiji.
In 1993, Sonoma State University awarded Burr an honorary doctorate. He supported medical and educational institutions in Denver, and in 1993, the University of Colorado awarded him an honorary doctorate for his acting work. Burr also founded and financed the American Fijian Foundation that funded academic research, including efforts to develop a dictionary of the language.
Burr made repeated trips on behalf of the United Service Organizations (USO). He toured both Korea and Vietnam during wartime and once spent six months touring Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. He sometimes organized his own troupe and toured bases both in the U.S. and overseas, often small installations that the USO did not serve, like one tour of Greenland, Baffin Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. Returning from Vietnam in 1965, he made a speaking tour of the U.S. to advocate an intensified war effort. As the war became more controversial, he modified his tone, called for more attention to the sacrifice of the troops, and said, "My only position on the war is that I wish it were over." In October 1967, NBC aired Raymond Burr Visits Vietnam, a documentary of one of his visits. The reception was mixed. "The impressions he came up with are neither weighty nor particularly revealing", wrote the Chicago Tribune; the Los Angeles Times said Burr's questions were "intelligent and elicited some interesting replies".
Burr had a reputation in Hollywood as a thoughtful, generous man years before much of his more-visible philanthropic work. In 1960, Ray Collins, who portrayed Lt. Arthur Tragg on the original Perry Mason series, and who was by that time often ill and unable to remember all the lines he was supposed to speak, stated, "There is nothing but kindness from our star, Ray Burr. Part of his life is dedicated to us, and that's no bull. If there's anything the matter with any of us, he comes around before anyone else and does what he can to help. He's a great star—in the old tradition."
Illness and death
During the filming of his last Perry Mason movie in the spring of 1993, Burr fell ill. A Viacom spokesperson told the media that the illness might be related to the renal cell carcinoma (malignant kidney tumor) that had been removed from Burr that February. It was determined that the cancer had spread to his liver and was at that point inoperable. Burr threw several "goodbye parties" before his death on September 12, 1993, at his Sonoma County ranch near Healdsburg. He was 76 years old.
The day after Burr's death, American Bar Association president R. William Ide III released a statement: "Raymond Burr's portrayals of Perry Mason represented lawyers in a professional and dignified manner. ... Mr. Burr strove for such authenticity in his courtroom characterizations that we regard his passing as though we lost one of our own." The New York Times reported that Perry Mason had been named second—after F. Lee Bailey, and before Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, Janet Reno, Ben Matlock and Hillary Clinton—in a recent National Law Journal poll that asked Americans to name the attorney, fictional or not, they most admired.
Burr was interred with his parents at Fraser Cemetery, New Westminster, British Columbia. On October 1, 1993, about 600 family members and friends paid tribute to Burr at a private memorial service at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Burr bequeathed his estate to Robert Benevides, and excluded all relatives, including a sister, nieces, and nephews. His will was challenged, without success, by the two children of his late brother, James E. Burr. Benevides's attorney said that tabloid reports of an estate worth $32 million were an overestimate.
Accolades
For his work in the TV series Perry Mason, Burr received the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Continuing Character) in a Dramatic Series at the 11th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1959. Nominated again in 1960, he received his second Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Series (Lead) at the 13th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1961. Burr was named Favorite Male Performer, for Perry Mason, in TV Guide magazine's inaugural TV Guide Award readers poll in 1960. He also received the second annual award in 1961.
In 1960, Burr was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6656 Hollywood Boulevard. Burr received six Emmy nominations (1968–72) for his work in the TV series Ironside. He was nominated twice, in 1969 and 1972, for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama. A benefactor of legal education, Burr was principal speaker at the founders' banquet of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, in June 1973. The Raymond Burr Award for Excellence in Criminal Law was established in his honor.
Burr was ranked #44 on TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time in 1996. Completed in 1996, a circular garden at the entrance to the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, honors Burr for his role in establishing the museum. Burr was a trustee and an early supporter who chaired the museum's first capital campaign and made direct contributions from his collection. A display about Burr as an actor, benefactor and collector opened in the museum's Great Hall of Shells in 2012.
From 2000 to 2006, the Raymond Burr Performing Arts Society leased the historic Columbia Theatre from the city of New Westminster, and renamed it the Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre. Although the nonprofit organization hoped to raise funds to renovate and expand the venue, its contract was not renewed. The group was a failed bidder when the theater was sold in 2011.
In 2008, Canada Post issued a postage stamp in its "Canadians in Hollywood" series featuring Burr. Burr received the 2009 Canadian Legends Award and a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto. The induction ceremony was held on September 12, 2009. A 2014 article in The Atlantic that examined how Netflix categorized nearly 77,000 different personalized genres found that Burr was rated as the favorite actor by Netflix users, with the greatest number of dedicated microgenres.
Theatre credits
Film credits
Radio credits
Television credits
See also
List of celebrities who own wineries and vineyards
Notes
References
External links
Raymond Burr at the MBC Encyclopedia of Television
Complete biography of Raymond Burr
Raymond Burr at Find a Grave
1917 births
1993 deaths
20th-century Canadian male actors
Berkeley High School (Berkeley, California) alumni
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian expatriate male actors in the United States
Canadian gay actors
Canadian male film actors
Canadian male radio actors
Canadian male television actors
Canadian people of World War II
Canadian philanthropists
Civilian Conservation Corps people
Columbia University alumni
Deaths from cancer in California
Deaths from kidney cancer
Male actors from British Columbia
Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actor in a Drama Series Primetime Emmy Award winners
Stanford University alumni
| true |
[
"\"What Do You Want from Me?\" is a 2007 song recorded by Cascada. It was released in Germany on 7 March 2008 and was released on 24 March 2008 for the UK.\n\nBackground and writing\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" was leaked online in advance of the Perfect Day album release, and was speculated to be title \"Tell Me Why\". In late 2007, All Around the World announced \"What Do You Want From Me?\" would be the U.K. follow-up to \"What Hurts the Most\".\n\nThis track and \"Everytime We Touch\" share a similar chord structure.\n\nMusic video \n\nCascada's UK music label, All Around the World, released the music video on 19 January 2008, on their official site. In the video, Natalie and 3 friends are seen at a beach-side house, on the beach, and at a late night party, singing and dancing. In all scenes, she is continuously being followed or somehow connected by a young man, hence the song title \"What Do You Want From Me?\".\n\nTrack listing\nGerman release\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Extended Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (S & H Project Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (DJ Gollum Radio Edit)\n\nUK release\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (K-Klass Classic Radio Edit)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Original/Extended Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Hypasonic Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (K-Klass Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Manox Remix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me?\" (Fugitive's Freedom Mix)\n\nOfficial remixes\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Radio Edit) 2:50\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Extended Mix) 4:46\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (K-Klass Remix) 6:28\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (K-Klass Radio Edit) 3:34\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Flip and Fill Remix) 6:07\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Hypasonic Remix) 6:07\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Fugitives Freedom Remix) 5:22\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Manox Remix) 6:02\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Manox Radio Edit) 3:31\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Fugitives Freedom Radio Edit) 3:57\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Ti-Mo Vs Stefan Rio Remix) 5:08\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Ti-Mo Vs Stefan Rio Radio Edit) 3:43\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Cyrus Remix) 5:35\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Cyrus Radio Edit) 3:33\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Club Mix) 4:59\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Alex K Remix) 4:20\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Original Mix) 4:44\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (S & H Project Radio Edit) 3:34\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (S & H Project Remix) 5:47\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Gollum Radio Edit) 3:35\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (DJ Gollum Remix) 5:24\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Basslovers United Radio Edit) 3:40\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Basslovers United Extended Mix)\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Studio Acapella With Out Effects)\n\"What Do You Want From Me\" (Scotty-Donk Project 2010 Remix)\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\nCascada songs\n2008 singles\nSongs written by Yanou\nSongs written by DJ Manian\n2008 songs",
"\"Don't Know What to Do\" is an electro pop/rock track by New Zealand singer Dane Rumble. It is the second single taken from Rumble's debut solo album, The Experiment. The track was released as a digital single in February 2009.\n\nSingle information\nRumble says the song is about his love/hate relationship with music. \"I've experienced so many ups and downs in this game... and I still can't stop.\" Dane once again worked with Ivan Slavov for the music video, who had already directed the video for \"Always Be Here\". The song was sent to Australian contemporary hit radio on 29 November 2010.\n\n\"Don't Know What to Do\" debuted on the New Zealand Singles Chart on 27 July 2009 at #36. The song has so far peaked at number 10, becoming Rumble's second consecutive top 20 single as a solo artist and his first top ten hit.\n\n\"Don't Know What to Do\" also debuted on the Top 40 the same week Dane's previous single \"Always Be Here\" drops out of the Top 40.\n\nOn 31 January 2010, \"Don't Know What to Do\" was certified Gold with sales of over 7,500 in New Zealand.\n\nMusic video\n\nThe music video for \"Don't Know What to Do\" was released at the iTunes Store on 16 February 2009, the same day as the single and \"Always Be Here\".\n\nPromotional events\n24 August 2009 – More FM Radio\n25 August 2009 – ZM Radio Interview\n18 September 2009 – The Transmission Room Gig\n24 September 2009 – The Edge Nudie Nuptials Performance\n24 September 2009 – Juice Bar Gig\n26 September 2009 – C4 Top 40 Countdown\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n2009 singles\nDane Rumble songs"
] |
[
"Raymond Burr",
"Radio",
"what did he do on the radio",
"He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income.\""
] |
C_ce9c0a6e58fb4956a7b1aa750ba1c994_0
|
how much did he make
| 2 |
how much did Raymond Burr make
|
Raymond Burr
|
As a young man Burr weighed more than 300 lbs., which limited his on-screen roles. "But in radio this presented no problems, given the magnificent quality of his voice," reported The Globe and Mail. "He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income." Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast. He had a regular role in Jack Webb's first radio show, Pat Novak for Hire (1949), and in Dragnet (1949-50) he played Joe Friday's boss, Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives. Burr worked on other Los Angeles-based series including Suspense, Screen Directors Playhouse, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Family Theater, Hallmark Playhouse and Hallmark Hall of Fame. He performed in five episodes of the experimental dramatic radio anthology series CBS Radio Workshop, and had what is arguably his best radio role in "The Silent Witness" (1957), in which his is the only voice. In 1956 Burr was the star of CBS Radio's Fort Laramie, an adult Western drama produced, written and directed by the creators of Gunsmoke. He played the role of Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry, in the series set at a post-Civil War military post where disease, boredom, the elements and the uncharted terrain were the greatest enemies of "ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times". The half-hour transcribed program aired Sundays at 5:30 p.m. ET January 22 - October 28, 1956. Burr told columnist Sheilah Graham that he had received 1,500 fan letters after the first broadcasts, and he continued to receive letters praising the show's authenticity and presentation of human dignity. In August 1956, CBS announced that Burr would star in the television series Perry Mason. Although the network wanted Burr to continue work on Fort Laramie as well, the TV series required an extraordinary commitment and the radio show ended. Known for his loyalty and consciousness of history, Burr went out of his way to employ his radio colleagues in his television programs. Some 180 radio celebrities appeared on Perry Mason during the first season alone. CANNOTANSWER
|
he earned a steady and comfortable income."
|
William Raymond Stacy Burr (May 21, 1917September 12, 1993) was a Canadian-American actor known for his lengthy Hollywood film career and his title roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.
Burr's early acting career included roles on Broadway, radio, television, and film, usually as the villain. His portrayal of the suspected murderer in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window (1954) is his best-known film role, although he is also remembered for his role in the 1956 film Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, which he reprised in the 1985 film Godzilla 1985. He won Emmy Awards for acting in 1959 and 1961 for the role of Perry Mason, which he played for nine seasons (1957–1966) and reprised in a series of 26 Perry Mason TV movies (1985–1993). His second TV series Ironside earned him six Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations.
Burr died of cancer in 1993, and his personal life came into question, as many details of his biography appeared to be unverifiable. He was ranked number 44 of the 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time by TV Guide magazine in 1996.
Early life
William Raymond Stacy Burr was born May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia. His father William Johnston Burr (1889–1985) was a hardware salesman; his mother Minerva Annette (née Smith, 1892–1974) was a pianist and music teacher.
When Burr was six, his parents divorced. His mother moved to Vallejo, California, with him and his younger siblings Geraldine and James, while his father remained in New Westminster. Burr briefly attended San Rafael Military Academy in San Rafael, California, and graduated from Berkeley High School.
In later years, Burr freely invented stories of a happy childhood – as with many other autobiographical details he provided about his life, they are not verifiable and have no evidence to support their accuracy. In 1986, he told journalist Jane Ardmore that, when he was 12 years old, his mother sent him to New Mexico for a year to work as a ranch hand. He was already his full adult height and rather large and "had fallen in with a group of college-aged kids who didn't realize how young Raymond was, and they let him tag along with them in activities and situations far too sophisticated for him to handle". He developed a passion for growing things and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps for a year in his teens. He did acting work in his teen years, making his stage debut at age 12 with a Vancouver stock company.
Theater
Burr grew up during the Great Depression and hoped to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, but he was unable to afford the tuition. By his own account, which is open to question, in 1934 he joined a repertory theatre group in Toronto that toured throughout Canada, then joined another company that toured India, Australia, and England. He briefly attended Long Beach Junior College and taught for a semester at San Jose Junior College, working nights as a radio actor and singer. Resuming the verifiable part of his autobiography, Burr began his association with the Pasadena Playhouse in 1937.
Burr moved to New York in 1940 and made his first Broadway appearance in Crazy With the Heat, a two-act musical revue produced by Kurt Kasznar that quickly folded. His first starring role on the stage came in November 1942 when he was an emergency replacement in a Pasadena Playhouse production of Quiet Wedding. He became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse drama faculty for 18 months, and he performed in some 30 plays over the years. He returned to Broadway for Patrick Hamilton's The Duke in Darkness (1944), a psychological drama set during the French Wars of Religion. His performance as the loyal friend of the imprisoned protagonist led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures.
Film
Burr appeared in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957, creating an array of villains that established him as an icon of film noir. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in ten films: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Blue Gardenia (1953), and Crime of Passion (1957). Silver described Burr's private detective in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic", a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir, in contrast with the appealing television characters for which Burr later became famous. "He tried to make you see the psychosis below the surface, even when the parts weren't huge," said film historian James Ursini. "He was able to bring such complexity and different levels to those characters, and create sympathy for his characters even though they were doing reprehensible things."
Other titles in Burr's film noir legacy include Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), Unmasked (1950), The Whip Hand (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), Rear Window (1954), They Were So Young (1954), A Cry in the Night (1956), and Affair in Havana (1957). His villains were also seen in Westerns, period dramas, horror films, and adventure films.
"I was just a fat heavy", Burr told journalist James Bawden. "I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take one look at me and scream and can you blame them? I was drowned, beaten, stabbed and all for my art. But I knew I was horribly overweight. I lacked any kind of self esteem. At 25 I was playing the fathers of people older than me."
Burr's occasional roles on the right side of the law include the aggressive prosecutor in A Place in the Sun (1951). His courtroom performance in that film made an impression on Gail Patrick and her husband Cornwell Jackson, who had Burr in mind when they began casting the role of Los Angeles district attorney Hamilton Burger in the CBS-TV series Perry Mason.
Radio
By the age of 12, Burr was appearing in national radio dramas broadcasting in nearby San Francisco.
As a young man Burr weighed more than 300 lbs., which limited his on-screen roles. "But in radio this presented no problems, given the magnificent quality of his voice", reported The Globe and Mail. "He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income."
Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast. He had a regular role in Jack Webb's first radio show, Pat Novak for Hire (1949), and in Dragnet (1949–50) he played Joe Friday's boss, Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives. Burr worked on other Los Angeles-based series including Suspense, Screen Directors Playhouse, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Family Theater, Hallmark Playhouse and Hallmark Hall of Fame. He performed in five episodes of the experimental dramatic radio anthology series CBS Radio Workshop, and had what is arguably his best radio role in "The Silent Witness" (1957), in which his is the only voice.
In 1956 Burr was the star of CBS Radio's Fort Laramie, an adult Western drama produced, written and directed by the creators of Gunsmoke. He played the role of Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry, in the series set at a post-Civil War military post where disease, boredom, the elements and the uncharted terrain were the greatest enemies of "ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times". The half-hour transcribed program aired Sundays at 5:30 p.m. ET January 22 – October 28, 1956. Burr told columnist Sheilah Graham that he had received 1,500 fan letters after the first broadcasts, and he continued to receive letters praising the show's authenticity and presentation of human dignity.
In August 1956, CBS announced that Burr would star in the television series Perry Mason. Although the network wanted Burr to continue work on Fort Laramie as well, the TV series required an extraordinary commitment and the radio show ended.
Known for his loyalty and consciousness of history, Burr went out of his way to employ his radio colleagues in his television programs. Some 180 radio celebrities appeared on Perry Mason during the first season alone.
Television
Burr emerged as a prolific television character actor in the 1950s. He made his television debut in 1951, appearing in episodes of Stars Over Hollywood, The Bigelow Theatre, Family Theater and the debut episode of Dragnet. He went on to appear in such programs as Gruen Playhouse, Four Star Playhouse, Ford Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, Mr. and Mrs. North, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars and Playhouse 90.
Perry Mason
In 1956, Burr auditioned for the role of District Attorney Hamilton Burger in Perry Mason, a new CBS-TV courtroom drama based on the highly successful novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. Executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson had been impressed with Burr's courtroom performance in A Place in the Sun (1951), and she told Burr that he was perfect for Perry Mason but at least overweight. He went on a crash diet over the following month; he then tested as Perry Mason and was cast in the role. While Burr's test was running, Gardner reportedly stood up, pointed at the screen, and said, "That's Perry Mason." William Hopper also auditioned as Mason, but he was cast instead as private detective Paul Drake. The series also starred Barbara Hale as Della Street, Mason's secretary, William Talman as Hamilton Burger, the district attorney who loses nearly every case to Mason, and Ray Collins as homicide detective Lieutenant Arthur Tragg.
The series ran from 1957 to 1966 and made Burr a star. In the early 1960s, the show had 30 million viewers every Saturday night and Burr received 3,000 fan letters a week. Burr received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations and won the award in 1959 and 1961 for his performance as Perry Mason. The series has been rerun in syndication ever since, and was released on DVD between 2006 and 2013. Burr's character is often said never to have lost a case, although he did lose two murder cases off-screen in early episodes of the series.
Ironside
Burr moved from CBS to Universal Studios, where he played the title role in the television drama Ironside, which ran on NBC from 1967 to 1975. In the pilot episode, San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside is paralyzed by a sniper during an attempt on his life and, after his recovery, uses a wheelchair for mobility, in the first crime drama show to star a policeman with a disability. The show earned Burr six Emmy nominations—one for the pilot and five for his work in the series—and two Golden Globe nominations.
Other series
After Ironside went off the air, NBC failed in two attempts to launch Burr as the star of a new series. In a two-hour television movie format, Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence aired in February 1976 with Burr again in the role of the lawyer who outwits the district attorney. Despite good reviews for Burr, the critical reception was poor, and NBC decided against developing it into a series.
In 1977, Burr starred in the short-lived TV series Kingston: Confidential as R.B. Kingston, a William Randolph Hearst-esque publishing magnate, owner of numerous newspapers and TV stations, who, in his spare time, solved crimes along with a group of employees. It was a critical failure that was scheduled opposite the extraordinarily popular Charlie's Angels. It was cancelled after 13 weeks.
Burr took on a shorter project next, playing an underworld boss in a six-hour miniseries, 79 Park Avenue.
One last attempt to launch a series followed on CBS. The two-hour premiere of The Jordan Chance aroused little interest.
On January 20, 1987, Burr hosted the television special that later served as the pilot for the long-running series Unsolved Mysteries.
Television films
In 1985, Burr was approached by producers Dean Hargrove and Fred Silverman to star in a made-for-TV movie, Perry Mason Returns. The same week, Burr recalled, he was asked to reprise the role he played in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), in a low-budget film that would be titled Godzilla 1985.
"When they asked me to do it a second time, I said, 'Certainly,' and everybody thought I was out of my mind," Burr told Tom Shales of The Washington Post. "But it wasn't the large sum of money. It was the fact that, first of all, I kind of liked 'Godzilla,' and where do you get the opportunity to play yourself 30 years later? So I said yes to both of them." Although Burr is best remembered for his role as Perry Mason, a devoted following continues to appreciate him as the actor that brought the Godzilla series to America.
He agreed to do the Mason movie if Barbara Hale returned to reprise her role as Della Street. Hale agreed, and when Perry Mason Returns aired in December 1985, her character became the defendant. The rest of the principal cast had died, but Hale's real-life son William Katt played the role of Paul Drake, Jr. The movie was so successful that Burr made a total of 26 Perry Mason television films before his death. Many were filmed in and around Denver, Colorado.
By 1993, when Burr signed with NBC for another season of Mason films, he was using a wheelchair full-time because of his failing health. In his final Perry Mason movie, The Case of the Killer Kiss, he was shown either sitting or standing while leaning on a table, but only once standing unsupported for a few seconds. Twelve more Mason movies were scheduled before Burr's death, including one scheduled to film the month he died.
As he had with the Perry Mason TV movies, Burr decided to do an Ironside reunion movie. The Return of Ironside aired in May 1993, reuniting the entire original cast of the 1967–75 series. Like many of the Mason movies, it was set and filmed in Denver.
Personal life
Physical characteristics
Burr said that he weighed 12.75 pounds (5.8 kg) at birth, and was chubby throughout his childhood. "When you're a little fat boy in public school, or any kind of school, you're just persecuted something awful", he said. His weight was always an issue for him in getting roles, and it became a public relations problem when Johnny Carson began making jokes about him during his Tonight Show monologues. Burr refused to appear as Carson's guest from then on, and told Us Weekly years later: "I have been asked a number of times to do his show and I won't do it. Because I like NBC. He's doing an NBC show. If I went on I'd have some things to say, not just about the bad jokes he's done about me, but bad jokes he does about everybody who can't fight back because they aren't there. And that wouldn't be good for NBC."
Family life
Burr married actress Isabella Ward (1919–2004) on January 10, 1948. They met in 1943 while she was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse where Burr was teaching. They met again in 1947 when she was in California with a theater company. They were married shortly before Burr began work on the 1948 film noir Pitfall. In May 1948, they appeared on stage together in a Pasadena Playhouse production based on the life of Paul Gauguin. They lived in the basement apartment of a large house in Hollywood that Burr shared with his mother and grandparents. The marriage ended within months, and Ward returned to her native Delaware. They divorced in 1952, and neither remarried.
In 1960, Burr met Robert Benevides, an actor and Korean War veteran, on the set of Perry Mason. Benevides gave up acting in 1963, and he became a production consultant for 21 of the Perry Mason TV movies. They owned and operated an orchid business and then a vineyard in California's Dry Creek Valley. They were domestic partners until Burr's death in 1993. Burr bequeathed his entire estate to Benevides, and Benevides renamed the Dry Creek property Raymond Burr Vineyards (reportedly against Burr's wishes) and managed it as a commercial enterprise. In 2017, the property was sold.
Although Burr had not revealed his homosexuality during his lifetime, it was reported in the press upon his death.
Biographical contradictions
At various times in his career, Burr and his managers and publicists offered spurious or unverifiable biographical details to the press and public. Burr's obituary in The New York Times states that he entered the US Navy in 1944, after The Duke in Darkness, and left in 1946, weighing almost . Although Burr may have served in the Coast Guard, reports of his service in the US Navy are false, as apparently are his statements that he sustained battle injuries at Okinawa.
Other false biographical details include years of college education at a variety of institutions, being widowed twice, a son who died young, world travel and success in high school athletics. Most of these claims were apparently accepted as fact by the press during Burr's lifetime, up until his death and by his first biographer, Ona Hill.
Burr reportedly was married at the beginning of World War II to an actress named Annette Sutherland—killed, Burr said, in the same 1943 plane crash that claimed the life of actor Leslie Howard. However, multiple sources have reported that no one by that name appears on any of the published passenger manifests from the flight. A son supposedly born during this marriage, Michael Evan, was said to have died of leukemia in 1953 at the age of ten. Another marriage purportedly took place in the early 1950s to a Laura Andrina Morgan—who died of cancer, Burr said, in 1955. Yet no evidence exists of either marriage, nor of a son's birth, other than Burr's own claims. As late as 1991, Burr stood by the account of this son's life and death. He told Parade that when he realized Michael was dying, he took him on a one-year tour of the United States. "Before my boy left, before his time was gone", he said, "I wanted him to see the beauty of his country and its people." After Burr's death, his publicist confirmed that Burr worked steadily in Hollywood throughout 1952, the year that he was supposedly touring the country with his son.
In the late 1950s, Burr was rumored to be romantically involved with Natalie Wood. Wood's agent sent her on public dates so she could be noticed by directors and producers, and so the men she dated could present themselves in public as heterosexuals. The dates helped to disguise Wood's relationship with Robert Wagner, whom she later married. Burr reportedly resented Warner Bros.' decision to promote her attachment to another gay actor, Tab Hunter, rather than him. Robert Benevides later said, "He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess."
Later accounts of Burr's life say that he hid his homosexuality to protect his career. "That was a time in Hollywood history when homosexuality was not countenanced", Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas recalled in a 2000 episode of Biography. "Ray was not a romantic star by any means, but he was a very popular figure ... If it was revealed at that time in Hollywood history it would have been very difficult for him to continue."
Arthur Marks, a producer of Perry Mason, recalled Burr's talk of wives and children: "I know he was just putting on a show. ... That was my gut feeling. I think the wives and the loving women, the Natalie Wood thing, were a bit of a cover." Dean Hargrove, executive producer of the Perry Mason TV films, said in 2006, "I had always assumed that Raymond was gay, because he had a relationship with Robert Benevides for a very long time. Whether or not he had relationships with women, I had no idea. I did know that I had trouble keeping track of whether he was married or not in these stories. Raymond had the ability to mythologize himself, to some extent, and some of his stories about his past ... tended to grow as time went by."
Hobbies and businesses
Burr had many hobbies over the course of his life: cultivating orchids and collecting wine, art, stamps, and seashells. He was very fond of cooking. He was interested in flying, sailing, and fishing. According to A&E Biography, Burr was an avid reader with a retentive memory. He was also among the earliest importers and breeders of Portuguese water dogs in the United States.
Burr developed his interest in cultivating and hybridizing orchids into a business with Benevides. Over 20 years, their company, Sea God Nurseries, had nurseries in Fiji, Hawaii, the Azores, and California, and was responsible for adding more than 1,500 new orchids to the worldwide catalog. Burr named one of them the "Barbara Hale Orchid" after his Perry Mason costar. Burr and Benevides cultivated Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and grapes for Port wine, as well as orchids, at Burr's farmland holdings in Sonoma County, California.
In 1965, Burr purchased Naitauba, a island in Fiji, rich in seashells. There, he and Benevides oversaw the raising of copra (coconut meat) and cattle, as well as orchids. Burr planned to retire there permanently. However, medical problems made that impossible and he sold the property in 1983.
Philanthropy
Burr was a well-known philanthropist. He gave enormous sums of money, including his salaries from the Perry Mason movies, to charity. He was also known for sharing his wealth with friends. He sponsored 26 foster children through the Foster Parents' Plan or Save The Children, many with the greatest medical needs. He gave money and some of his Perry Mason scripts to the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California.
Burr was an early supporter of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, raising funds and chairing its first capital campaign. He donated a large collection of Fijian cowries and cones from his island in Fiji.
In 1993, Sonoma State University awarded Burr an honorary doctorate. He supported medical and educational institutions in Denver, and in 1993, the University of Colorado awarded him an honorary doctorate for his acting work. Burr also founded and financed the American Fijian Foundation that funded academic research, including efforts to develop a dictionary of the language.
Burr made repeated trips on behalf of the United Service Organizations (USO). He toured both Korea and Vietnam during wartime and once spent six months touring Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. He sometimes organized his own troupe and toured bases both in the U.S. and overseas, often small installations that the USO did not serve, like one tour of Greenland, Baffin Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. Returning from Vietnam in 1965, he made a speaking tour of the U.S. to advocate an intensified war effort. As the war became more controversial, he modified his tone, called for more attention to the sacrifice of the troops, and said, "My only position on the war is that I wish it were over." In October 1967, NBC aired Raymond Burr Visits Vietnam, a documentary of one of his visits. The reception was mixed. "The impressions he came up with are neither weighty nor particularly revealing", wrote the Chicago Tribune; the Los Angeles Times said Burr's questions were "intelligent and elicited some interesting replies".
Burr had a reputation in Hollywood as a thoughtful, generous man years before much of his more-visible philanthropic work. In 1960, Ray Collins, who portrayed Lt. Arthur Tragg on the original Perry Mason series, and who was by that time often ill and unable to remember all the lines he was supposed to speak, stated, "There is nothing but kindness from our star, Ray Burr. Part of his life is dedicated to us, and that's no bull. If there's anything the matter with any of us, he comes around before anyone else and does what he can to help. He's a great star—in the old tradition."
Illness and death
During the filming of his last Perry Mason movie in the spring of 1993, Burr fell ill. A Viacom spokesperson told the media that the illness might be related to the renal cell carcinoma (malignant kidney tumor) that had been removed from Burr that February. It was determined that the cancer had spread to his liver and was at that point inoperable. Burr threw several "goodbye parties" before his death on September 12, 1993, at his Sonoma County ranch near Healdsburg. He was 76 years old.
The day after Burr's death, American Bar Association president R. William Ide III released a statement: "Raymond Burr's portrayals of Perry Mason represented lawyers in a professional and dignified manner. ... Mr. Burr strove for such authenticity in his courtroom characterizations that we regard his passing as though we lost one of our own." The New York Times reported that Perry Mason had been named second—after F. Lee Bailey, and before Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, Janet Reno, Ben Matlock and Hillary Clinton—in a recent National Law Journal poll that asked Americans to name the attorney, fictional or not, they most admired.
Burr was interred with his parents at Fraser Cemetery, New Westminster, British Columbia. On October 1, 1993, about 600 family members and friends paid tribute to Burr at a private memorial service at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Burr bequeathed his estate to Robert Benevides, and excluded all relatives, including a sister, nieces, and nephews. His will was challenged, without success, by the two children of his late brother, James E. Burr. Benevides's attorney said that tabloid reports of an estate worth $32 million were an overestimate.
Accolades
For his work in the TV series Perry Mason, Burr received the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Continuing Character) in a Dramatic Series at the 11th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1959. Nominated again in 1960, he received his second Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Series (Lead) at the 13th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1961. Burr was named Favorite Male Performer, for Perry Mason, in TV Guide magazine's inaugural TV Guide Award readers poll in 1960. He also received the second annual award in 1961.
In 1960, Burr was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6656 Hollywood Boulevard. Burr received six Emmy nominations (1968–72) for his work in the TV series Ironside. He was nominated twice, in 1969 and 1972, for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama. A benefactor of legal education, Burr was principal speaker at the founders' banquet of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, in June 1973. The Raymond Burr Award for Excellence in Criminal Law was established in his honor.
Burr was ranked #44 on TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time in 1996. Completed in 1996, a circular garden at the entrance to the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, honors Burr for his role in establishing the museum. Burr was a trustee and an early supporter who chaired the museum's first capital campaign and made direct contributions from his collection. A display about Burr as an actor, benefactor and collector opened in the museum's Great Hall of Shells in 2012.
From 2000 to 2006, the Raymond Burr Performing Arts Society leased the historic Columbia Theatre from the city of New Westminster, and renamed it the Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre. Although the nonprofit organization hoped to raise funds to renovate and expand the venue, its contract was not renewed. The group was a failed bidder when the theater was sold in 2011.
In 2008, Canada Post issued a postage stamp in its "Canadians in Hollywood" series featuring Burr. Burr received the 2009 Canadian Legends Award and a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto. The induction ceremony was held on September 12, 2009. A 2014 article in The Atlantic that examined how Netflix categorized nearly 77,000 different personalized genres found that Burr was rated as the favorite actor by Netflix users, with the greatest number of dedicated microgenres.
Theatre credits
Film credits
Radio credits
Television credits
See also
List of celebrities who own wineries and vineyards
Notes
References
External links
Raymond Burr at the MBC Encyclopedia of Television
Complete biography of Raymond Burr
Raymond Burr at Find a Grave
1917 births
1993 deaths
20th-century Canadian male actors
Berkeley High School (Berkeley, California) alumni
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian expatriate male actors in the United States
Canadian gay actors
Canadian male film actors
Canadian male radio actors
Canadian male television actors
Canadian people of World War II
Canadian philanthropists
Civilian Conservation Corps people
Columbia University alumni
Deaths from cancer in California
Deaths from kidney cancer
Male actors from British Columbia
Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actor in a Drama Series Primetime Emmy Award winners
Stanford University alumni
| true |
[
"Frank Minion (born January 3, 1929 in Baltimore) is an American jazz and bop singer, with some rhythm and blues and reggae influences. In 1954 he covered \"How High the Moon\" and \"Sweet Lorraine\". He later worked with Roland Alexander. In 1960 he released the album The Soft Land of Make Believe on the Victor Records label, accompanied by Bill Evans. Some of his best known recordings include \"Introduction to Black Opium Street\", \"How Much Land (Does A Man Need)\", and \"Watermelon\" (1960). He also did a notable cover of Cole Porter's \"Night and Day\".\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1929 births\nLiving people\nBebop singers\nAmerican jazz singers\nAmerican reggae musicians\nMusicians from Baltimore\nSingers from Maryland\nJazz musicians from Maryland",
"\"Sweet Memory\" is a 1983 song by English pop/new wave band The Belle Stars, released as their eighth single overall. Unlike its predecessor, Sign of the Times, it did not make it into the top 10. However, it did manage to get into the top 30, peaking at #22.\n\nBackground\nSweet Memory is a song that conveys how much hatred the singer and the lover used to show each other, and how the lover should stop wasting his love by cheating on other people. The singer explains how she brings back terrible memories when thinking about how much hatred her and her lover portrayed.\n\nBridge\nThe bridge of the song features many different vocal styles sung by Jennie Matthias. First, she sings vocal hiccups, then does grunting, and, towards the end of the bridge, does a scream.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video for the song features the band performing live. It was produced by Pete Collins.\n\nTrack listings\nGermany Vinyl 7\" Single (6 13880)\n \"Sweet Memory\"\n \"Sign of the Times\"\n\nUK Vinyl 7\" Single (BUY 174)\n \"Sweet Memory\"\n \"April Fool\"\n\nSpain Vinyl 12\" Maxi-Single (VIC-97)\n \"Sweet Memory\" (Extended Remix)\n \"April Fool\"\n \"The Entertainer\" (Extended Version)\n \"Indian Summer\" (Extended Remix)\n\nUK Vinyl 12\" Single (BUY-IT 174)\n \"Sweet Memory\" (Extended Remix)\n \"April Fool\"\n\nReferences\n\n1983 singles\nThe Belle Stars songs\n1983 songs\nStiff Records singles"
] |
[
"Raymond Burr",
"Radio",
"what did he do on the radio",
"He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income.\"",
"how much did he make",
"he earned a steady and comfortable income.\""
] |
C_ce9c0a6e58fb4956a7b1aa750ba1c994_0
|
what was he most known for
| 3 |
what was Raymond Burr most known for
|
Raymond Burr
|
As a young man Burr weighed more than 300 lbs., which limited his on-screen roles. "But in radio this presented no problems, given the magnificent quality of his voice," reported The Globe and Mail. "He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income." Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast. He had a regular role in Jack Webb's first radio show, Pat Novak for Hire (1949), and in Dragnet (1949-50) he played Joe Friday's boss, Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives. Burr worked on other Los Angeles-based series including Suspense, Screen Directors Playhouse, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Family Theater, Hallmark Playhouse and Hallmark Hall of Fame. He performed in five episodes of the experimental dramatic radio anthology series CBS Radio Workshop, and had what is arguably his best radio role in "The Silent Witness" (1957), in which his is the only voice. In 1956 Burr was the star of CBS Radio's Fort Laramie, an adult Western drama produced, written and directed by the creators of Gunsmoke. He played the role of Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry, in the series set at a post-Civil War military post where disease, boredom, the elements and the uncharted terrain were the greatest enemies of "ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times". The half-hour transcribed program aired Sundays at 5:30 p.m. ET January 22 - October 28, 1956. Burr told columnist Sheilah Graham that he had received 1,500 fan letters after the first broadcasts, and he continued to receive letters praising the show's authenticity and presentation of human dignity. In August 1956, CBS announced that Burr would star in the television series Perry Mason. Although the network wanted Burr to continue work on Fort Laramie as well, the TV series required an extraordinary commitment and the radio show ended. Known for his loyalty and consciousness of history, Burr went out of his way to employ his radio colleagues in his television programs. Some 180 radio celebrities appeared on Perry Mason during the first season alone. CANNOTANSWER
|
Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast.
|
William Raymond Stacy Burr (May 21, 1917September 12, 1993) was a Canadian-American actor known for his lengthy Hollywood film career and his title roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.
Burr's early acting career included roles on Broadway, radio, television, and film, usually as the villain. His portrayal of the suspected murderer in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window (1954) is his best-known film role, although he is also remembered for his role in the 1956 film Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, which he reprised in the 1985 film Godzilla 1985. He won Emmy Awards for acting in 1959 and 1961 for the role of Perry Mason, which he played for nine seasons (1957–1966) and reprised in a series of 26 Perry Mason TV movies (1985–1993). His second TV series Ironside earned him six Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations.
Burr died of cancer in 1993, and his personal life came into question, as many details of his biography appeared to be unverifiable. He was ranked number 44 of the 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time by TV Guide magazine in 1996.
Early life
William Raymond Stacy Burr was born May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia. His father William Johnston Burr (1889–1985) was a hardware salesman; his mother Minerva Annette (née Smith, 1892–1974) was a pianist and music teacher.
When Burr was six, his parents divorced. His mother moved to Vallejo, California, with him and his younger siblings Geraldine and James, while his father remained in New Westminster. Burr briefly attended San Rafael Military Academy in San Rafael, California, and graduated from Berkeley High School.
In later years, Burr freely invented stories of a happy childhood – as with many other autobiographical details he provided about his life, they are not verifiable and have no evidence to support their accuracy. In 1986, he told journalist Jane Ardmore that, when he was 12 years old, his mother sent him to New Mexico for a year to work as a ranch hand. He was already his full adult height and rather large and "had fallen in with a group of college-aged kids who didn't realize how young Raymond was, and they let him tag along with them in activities and situations far too sophisticated for him to handle". He developed a passion for growing things and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps for a year in his teens. He did acting work in his teen years, making his stage debut at age 12 with a Vancouver stock company.
Theater
Burr grew up during the Great Depression and hoped to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, but he was unable to afford the tuition. By his own account, which is open to question, in 1934 he joined a repertory theatre group in Toronto that toured throughout Canada, then joined another company that toured India, Australia, and England. He briefly attended Long Beach Junior College and taught for a semester at San Jose Junior College, working nights as a radio actor and singer. Resuming the verifiable part of his autobiography, Burr began his association with the Pasadena Playhouse in 1937.
Burr moved to New York in 1940 and made his first Broadway appearance in Crazy With the Heat, a two-act musical revue produced by Kurt Kasznar that quickly folded. His first starring role on the stage came in November 1942 when he was an emergency replacement in a Pasadena Playhouse production of Quiet Wedding. He became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse drama faculty for 18 months, and he performed in some 30 plays over the years. He returned to Broadway for Patrick Hamilton's The Duke in Darkness (1944), a psychological drama set during the French Wars of Religion. His performance as the loyal friend of the imprisoned protagonist led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures.
Film
Burr appeared in more than 50 feature films between 1946 and 1957, creating an array of villains that established him as an icon of film noir. Film historian Alain Silver concluded that Burr's most significant work in the genre is in ten films: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Blue Gardenia (1953), and Crime of Passion (1957). Silver described Burr's private detective in Pitfall as "both reprehensible and pathetic", a characterization also cited by film historian Richard Schickel as a prototype of film noir, in contrast with the appealing television characters for which Burr later became famous. "He tried to make you see the psychosis below the surface, even when the parts weren't huge," said film historian James Ursini. "He was able to bring such complexity and different levels to those characters, and create sympathy for his characters even though they were doing reprehensible things."
Other titles in Burr's film noir legacy include Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), Unmasked (1950), The Whip Hand (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), Rear Window (1954), They Were So Young (1954), A Cry in the Night (1956), and Affair in Havana (1957). His villains were also seen in Westerns, period dramas, horror films, and adventure films.
"I was just a fat heavy", Burr told journalist James Bawden. "I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take one look at me and scream and can you blame them? I was drowned, beaten, stabbed and all for my art. But I knew I was horribly overweight. I lacked any kind of self esteem. At 25 I was playing the fathers of people older than me."
Burr's occasional roles on the right side of the law include the aggressive prosecutor in A Place in the Sun (1951). His courtroom performance in that film made an impression on Gail Patrick and her husband Cornwell Jackson, who had Burr in mind when they began casting the role of Los Angeles district attorney Hamilton Burger in the CBS-TV series Perry Mason.
Radio
By the age of 12, Burr was appearing in national radio dramas broadcasting in nearby San Francisco.
As a young man Burr weighed more than 300 lbs., which limited his on-screen roles. "But in radio this presented no problems, given the magnificent quality of his voice", reported The Globe and Mail. "He played romantic leads and menacing villains with equal authority, and he earned a steady and comfortable income."
Working steadily in radio since the 1940s, often uncredited, Burr was a leading player on the West Coast. He had a regular role in Jack Webb's first radio show, Pat Novak for Hire (1949), and in Dragnet (1949–50) he played Joe Friday's boss, Ed Backstrand, chief of detectives. Burr worked on other Los Angeles-based series including Suspense, Screen Directors Playhouse, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Family Theater, Hallmark Playhouse and Hallmark Hall of Fame. He performed in five episodes of the experimental dramatic radio anthology series CBS Radio Workshop, and had what is arguably his best radio role in "The Silent Witness" (1957), in which his is the only voice.
In 1956 Burr was the star of CBS Radio's Fort Laramie, an adult Western drama produced, written and directed by the creators of Gunsmoke. He played the role of Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry, in the series set at a post-Civil War military post where disease, boredom, the elements and the uncharted terrain were the greatest enemies of "ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times". The half-hour transcribed program aired Sundays at 5:30 p.m. ET January 22 – October 28, 1956. Burr told columnist Sheilah Graham that he had received 1,500 fan letters after the first broadcasts, and he continued to receive letters praising the show's authenticity and presentation of human dignity.
In August 1956, CBS announced that Burr would star in the television series Perry Mason. Although the network wanted Burr to continue work on Fort Laramie as well, the TV series required an extraordinary commitment and the radio show ended.
Known for his loyalty and consciousness of history, Burr went out of his way to employ his radio colleagues in his television programs. Some 180 radio celebrities appeared on Perry Mason during the first season alone.
Television
Burr emerged as a prolific television character actor in the 1950s. He made his television debut in 1951, appearing in episodes of Stars Over Hollywood, The Bigelow Theatre, Family Theater and the debut episode of Dragnet. He went on to appear in such programs as Gruen Playhouse, Four Star Playhouse, Ford Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, Mr. and Mrs. North, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars and Playhouse 90.
Perry Mason
In 1956, Burr auditioned for the role of District Attorney Hamilton Burger in Perry Mason, a new CBS-TV courtroom drama based on the highly successful novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. Executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson had been impressed with Burr's courtroom performance in A Place in the Sun (1951), and she told Burr that he was perfect for Perry Mason but at least overweight. He went on a crash diet over the following month; he then tested as Perry Mason and was cast in the role. While Burr's test was running, Gardner reportedly stood up, pointed at the screen, and said, "That's Perry Mason." William Hopper also auditioned as Mason, but he was cast instead as private detective Paul Drake. The series also starred Barbara Hale as Della Street, Mason's secretary, William Talman as Hamilton Burger, the district attorney who loses nearly every case to Mason, and Ray Collins as homicide detective Lieutenant Arthur Tragg.
The series ran from 1957 to 1966 and made Burr a star. In the early 1960s, the show had 30 million viewers every Saturday night and Burr received 3,000 fan letters a week. Burr received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations and won the award in 1959 and 1961 for his performance as Perry Mason. The series has been rerun in syndication ever since, and was released on DVD between 2006 and 2013. Burr's character is often said never to have lost a case, although he did lose two murder cases off-screen in early episodes of the series.
Ironside
Burr moved from CBS to Universal Studios, where he played the title role in the television drama Ironside, which ran on NBC from 1967 to 1975. In the pilot episode, San Francisco Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside is paralyzed by a sniper during an attempt on his life and, after his recovery, uses a wheelchair for mobility, in the first crime drama show to star a policeman with a disability. The show earned Burr six Emmy nominations—one for the pilot and five for his work in the series—and two Golden Globe nominations.
Other series
After Ironside went off the air, NBC failed in two attempts to launch Burr as the star of a new series. In a two-hour television movie format, Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence aired in February 1976 with Burr again in the role of the lawyer who outwits the district attorney. Despite good reviews for Burr, the critical reception was poor, and NBC decided against developing it into a series.
In 1977, Burr starred in the short-lived TV series Kingston: Confidential as R.B. Kingston, a William Randolph Hearst-esque publishing magnate, owner of numerous newspapers and TV stations, who, in his spare time, solved crimes along with a group of employees. It was a critical failure that was scheduled opposite the extraordinarily popular Charlie's Angels. It was cancelled after 13 weeks.
Burr took on a shorter project next, playing an underworld boss in a six-hour miniseries, 79 Park Avenue.
One last attempt to launch a series followed on CBS. The two-hour premiere of The Jordan Chance aroused little interest.
On January 20, 1987, Burr hosted the television special that later served as the pilot for the long-running series Unsolved Mysteries.
Television films
In 1985, Burr was approached by producers Dean Hargrove and Fred Silverman to star in a made-for-TV movie, Perry Mason Returns. The same week, Burr recalled, he was asked to reprise the role he played in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), in a low-budget film that would be titled Godzilla 1985.
"When they asked me to do it a second time, I said, 'Certainly,' and everybody thought I was out of my mind," Burr told Tom Shales of The Washington Post. "But it wasn't the large sum of money. It was the fact that, first of all, I kind of liked 'Godzilla,' and where do you get the opportunity to play yourself 30 years later? So I said yes to both of them." Although Burr is best remembered for his role as Perry Mason, a devoted following continues to appreciate him as the actor that brought the Godzilla series to America.
He agreed to do the Mason movie if Barbara Hale returned to reprise her role as Della Street. Hale agreed, and when Perry Mason Returns aired in December 1985, her character became the defendant. The rest of the principal cast had died, but Hale's real-life son William Katt played the role of Paul Drake, Jr. The movie was so successful that Burr made a total of 26 Perry Mason television films before his death. Many were filmed in and around Denver, Colorado.
By 1993, when Burr signed with NBC for another season of Mason films, he was using a wheelchair full-time because of his failing health. In his final Perry Mason movie, The Case of the Killer Kiss, he was shown either sitting or standing while leaning on a table, but only once standing unsupported for a few seconds. Twelve more Mason movies were scheduled before Burr's death, including one scheduled to film the month he died.
As he had with the Perry Mason TV movies, Burr decided to do an Ironside reunion movie. The Return of Ironside aired in May 1993, reuniting the entire original cast of the 1967–75 series. Like many of the Mason movies, it was set and filmed in Denver.
Personal life
Physical characteristics
Burr said that he weighed 12.75 pounds (5.8 kg) at birth, and was chubby throughout his childhood. "When you're a little fat boy in public school, or any kind of school, you're just persecuted something awful", he said. His weight was always an issue for him in getting roles, and it became a public relations problem when Johnny Carson began making jokes about him during his Tonight Show monologues. Burr refused to appear as Carson's guest from then on, and told Us Weekly years later: "I have been asked a number of times to do his show and I won't do it. Because I like NBC. He's doing an NBC show. If I went on I'd have some things to say, not just about the bad jokes he's done about me, but bad jokes he does about everybody who can't fight back because they aren't there. And that wouldn't be good for NBC."
Family life
Burr married actress Isabella Ward (1919–2004) on January 10, 1948. They met in 1943 while she was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse where Burr was teaching. They met again in 1947 when she was in California with a theater company. They were married shortly before Burr began work on the 1948 film noir Pitfall. In May 1948, they appeared on stage together in a Pasadena Playhouse production based on the life of Paul Gauguin. They lived in the basement apartment of a large house in Hollywood that Burr shared with his mother and grandparents. The marriage ended within months, and Ward returned to her native Delaware. They divorced in 1952, and neither remarried.
In 1960, Burr met Robert Benevides, an actor and Korean War veteran, on the set of Perry Mason. Benevides gave up acting in 1963, and he became a production consultant for 21 of the Perry Mason TV movies. They owned and operated an orchid business and then a vineyard in California's Dry Creek Valley. They were domestic partners until Burr's death in 1993. Burr bequeathed his entire estate to Benevides, and Benevides renamed the Dry Creek property Raymond Burr Vineyards (reportedly against Burr's wishes) and managed it as a commercial enterprise. In 2017, the property was sold.
Although Burr had not revealed his homosexuality during his lifetime, it was reported in the press upon his death.
Biographical contradictions
At various times in his career, Burr and his managers and publicists offered spurious or unverifiable biographical details to the press and public. Burr's obituary in The New York Times states that he entered the US Navy in 1944, after The Duke in Darkness, and left in 1946, weighing almost . Although Burr may have served in the Coast Guard, reports of his service in the US Navy are false, as apparently are his statements that he sustained battle injuries at Okinawa.
Other false biographical details include years of college education at a variety of institutions, being widowed twice, a son who died young, world travel and success in high school athletics. Most of these claims were apparently accepted as fact by the press during Burr's lifetime, up until his death and by his first biographer, Ona Hill.
Burr reportedly was married at the beginning of World War II to an actress named Annette Sutherland—killed, Burr said, in the same 1943 plane crash that claimed the life of actor Leslie Howard. However, multiple sources have reported that no one by that name appears on any of the published passenger manifests from the flight. A son supposedly born during this marriage, Michael Evan, was said to have died of leukemia in 1953 at the age of ten. Another marriage purportedly took place in the early 1950s to a Laura Andrina Morgan—who died of cancer, Burr said, in 1955. Yet no evidence exists of either marriage, nor of a son's birth, other than Burr's own claims. As late as 1991, Burr stood by the account of this son's life and death. He told Parade that when he realized Michael was dying, he took him on a one-year tour of the United States. "Before my boy left, before his time was gone", he said, "I wanted him to see the beauty of his country and its people." After Burr's death, his publicist confirmed that Burr worked steadily in Hollywood throughout 1952, the year that he was supposedly touring the country with his son.
In the late 1950s, Burr was rumored to be romantically involved with Natalie Wood. Wood's agent sent her on public dates so she could be noticed by directors and producers, and so the men she dated could present themselves in public as heterosexuals. The dates helped to disguise Wood's relationship with Robert Wagner, whom she later married. Burr reportedly resented Warner Bros.' decision to promote her attachment to another gay actor, Tab Hunter, rather than him. Robert Benevides later said, "He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess."
Later accounts of Burr's life say that he hid his homosexuality to protect his career. "That was a time in Hollywood history when homosexuality was not countenanced", Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas recalled in a 2000 episode of Biography. "Ray was not a romantic star by any means, but he was a very popular figure ... If it was revealed at that time in Hollywood history it would have been very difficult for him to continue."
Arthur Marks, a producer of Perry Mason, recalled Burr's talk of wives and children: "I know he was just putting on a show. ... That was my gut feeling. I think the wives and the loving women, the Natalie Wood thing, were a bit of a cover." Dean Hargrove, executive producer of the Perry Mason TV films, said in 2006, "I had always assumed that Raymond was gay, because he had a relationship with Robert Benevides for a very long time. Whether or not he had relationships with women, I had no idea. I did know that I had trouble keeping track of whether he was married or not in these stories. Raymond had the ability to mythologize himself, to some extent, and some of his stories about his past ... tended to grow as time went by."
Hobbies and businesses
Burr had many hobbies over the course of his life: cultivating orchids and collecting wine, art, stamps, and seashells. He was very fond of cooking. He was interested in flying, sailing, and fishing. According to A&E Biography, Burr was an avid reader with a retentive memory. He was also among the earliest importers and breeders of Portuguese water dogs in the United States.
Burr developed his interest in cultivating and hybridizing orchids into a business with Benevides. Over 20 years, their company, Sea God Nurseries, had nurseries in Fiji, Hawaii, the Azores, and California, and was responsible for adding more than 1,500 new orchids to the worldwide catalog. Burr named one of them the "Barbara Hale Orchid" after his Perry Mason costar. Burr and Benevides cultivated Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and grapes for Port wine, as well as orchids, at Burr's farmland holdings in Sonoma County, California.
In 1965, Burr purchased Naitauba, a island in Fiji, rich in seashells. There, he and Benevides oversaw the raising of copra (coconut meat) and cattle, as well as orchids. Burr planned to retire there permanently. However, medical problems made that impossible and he sold the property in 1983.
Philanthropy
Burr was a well-known philanthropist. He gave enormous sums of money, including his salaries from the Perry Mason movies, to charity. He was also known for sharing his wealth with friends. He sponsored 26 foster children through the Foster Parents' Plan or Save The Children, many with the greatest medical needs. He gave money and some of his Perry Mason scripts to the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California.
Burr was an early supporter of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, raising funds and chairing its first capital campaign. He donated a large collection of Fijian cowries and cones from his island in Fiji.
In 1993, Sonoma State University awarded Burr an honorary doctorate. He supported medical and educational institutions in Denver, and in 1993, the University of Colorado awarded him an honorary doctorate for his acting work. Burr also founded and financed the American Fijian Foundation that funded academic research, including efforts to develop a dictionary of the language.
Burr made repeated trips on behalf of the United Service Organizations (USO). He toured both Korea and Vietnam during wartime and once spent six months touring Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. He sometimes organized his own troupe and toured bases both in the U.S. and overseas, often small installations that the USO did not serve, like one tour of Greenland, Baffin Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. Returning from Vietnam in 1965, he made a speaking tour of the U.S. to advocate an intensified war effort. As the war became more controversial, he modified his tone, called for more attention to the sacrifice of the troops, and said, "My only position on the war is that I wish it were over." In October 1967, NBC aired Raymond Burr Visits Vietnam, a documentary of one of his visits. The reception was mixed. "The impressions he came up with are neither weighty nor particularly revealing", wrote the Chicago Tribune; the Los Angeles Times said Burr's questions were "intelligent and elicited some interesting replies".
Burr had a reputation in Hollywood as a thoughtful, generous man years before much of his more-visible philanthropic work. In 1960, Ray Collins, who portrayed Lt. Arthur Tragg on the original Perry Mason series, and who was by that time often ill and unable to remember all the lines he was supposed to speak, stated, "There is nothing but kindness from our star, Ray Burr. Part of his life is dedicated to us, and that's no bull. If there's anything the matter with any of us, he comes around before anyone else and does what he can to help. He's a great star—in the old tradition."
Illness and death
During the filming of his last Perry Mason movie in the spring of 1993, Burr fell ill. A Viacom spokesperson told the media that the illness might be related to the renal cell carcinoma (malignant kidney tumor) that had been removed from Burr that February. It was determined that the cancer had spread to his liver and was at that point inoperable. Burr threw several "goodbye parties" before his death on September 12, 1993, at his Sonoma County ranch near Healdsburg. He was 76 years old.
The day after Burr's death, American Bar Association president R. William Ide III released a statement: "Raymond Burr's portrayals of Perry Mason represented lawyers in a professional and dignified manner. ... Mr. Burr strove for such authenticity in his courtroom characterizations that we regard his passing as though we lost one of our own." The New York Times reported that Perry Mason had been named second—after F. Lee Bailey, and before Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, Janet Reno, Ben Matlock and Hillary Clinton—in a recent National Law Journal poll that asked Americans to name the attorney, fictional or not, they most admired.
Burr was interred with his parents at Fraser Cemetery, New Westminster, British Columbia. On October 1, 1993, about 600 family members and friends paid tribute to Burr at a private memorial service at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Burr bequeathed his estate to Robert Benevides, and excluded all relatives, including a sister, nieces, and nephews. His will was challenged, without success, by the two children of his late brother, James E. Burr. Benevides's attorney said that tabloid reports of an estate worth $32 million were an overestimate.
Accolades
For his work in the TV series Perry Mason, Burr received the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Continuing Character) in a Dramatic Series at the 11th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1959. Nominated again in 1960, he received his second Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Series (Lead) at the 13th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1961. Burr was named Favorite Male Performer, for Perry Mason, in TV Guide magazine's inaugural TV Guide Award readers poll in 1960. He also received the second annual award in 1961.
In 1960, Burr was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6656 Hollywood Boulevard. Burr received six Emmy nominations (1968–72) for his work in the TV series Ironside. He was nominated twice, in 1969 and 1972, for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama. A benefactor of legal education, Burr was principal speaker at the founders' banquet of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, in June 1973. The Raymond Burr Award for Excellence in Criminal Law was established in his honor.
Burr was ranked #44 on TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time in 1996. Completed in 1996, a circular garden at the entrance to the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, Florida, honors Burr for his role in establishing the museum. Burr was a trustee and an early supporter who chaired the museum's first capital campaign and made direct contributions from his collection. A display about Burr as an actor, benefactor and collector opened in the museum's Great Hall of Shells in 2012.
From 2000 to 2006, the Raymond Burr Performing Arts Society leased the historic Columbia Theatre from the city of New Westminster, and renamed it the Raymond Burr Performing Arts Centre. Although the nonprofit organization hoped to raise funds to renovate and expand the venue, its contract was not renewed. The group was a failed bidder when the theater was sold in 2011.
In 2008, Canada Post issued a postage stamp in its "Canadians in Hollywood" series featuring Burr. Burr received the 2009 Canadian Legends Award and a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto. The induction ceremony was held on September 12, 2009. A 2014 article in The Atlantic that examined how Netflix categorized nearly 77,000 different personalized genres found that Burr was rated as the favorite actor by Netflix users, with the greatest number of dedicated microgenres.
Theatre credits
Film credits
Radio credits
Television credits
See also
List of celebrities who own wineries and vineyards
Notes
References
External links
Raymond Burr at the MBC Encyclopedia of Television
Complete biography of Raymond Burr
Raymond Burr at Find a Grave
1917 births
1993 deaths
20th-century Canadian male actors
Berkeley High School (Berkeley, California) alumni
Canadian emigrants to the United States
Canadian expatriate male actors in the United States
Canadian gay actors
Canadian male film actors
Canadian male radio actors
Canadian male television actors
Canadian people of World War II
Canadian philanthropists
Civilian Conservation Corps people
Columbia University alumni
Deaths from cancer in California
Deaths from kidney cancer
Male actors from British Columbia
Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actor in a Drama Series Primetime Emmy Award winners
Stanford University alumni
| true |
[
"Cullen Hightower (1923 – November 27, 2008) was a well-known quotation and quip writer from the United States. He is often associated with the American conservative political movement.\n\nHightower served in the U.S. army during World War II before beginning a career in sales. He began to publish his writing upon retirement. A collection of his quotations was published as Cullen Hightower's Wit Kit. One of Hightower's most notable quotations is \"People seldom become famous for what they say until after they are famous for what they've done.\" Ironically, Hightower became famous for what he said rather than for what he did. A number of other quotes are in his obituary.\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican humorists\n1923 births\n2008 deaths\nUnited States Army personnel of World War II",
"Richard C. Muhlberger (born 1938 in New Jersey, United States died March 23, 2019) was an American art critic, and museum curator. He was Curator of Education for the Worcester Art Museum. He later became a professor of art history at Western New England College, and the vice-director for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he is best recognized for his analysis of many famous art pieces.\n\nCareer\nSome of the most famous pieces Mühlberger has critiqued are done by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, and Pablo Picasso. Along with being a critic, Muhlberger was also a writer. He was known for a series containing critiques of illustrious authors. This series is made up of several books, \"What makes a Rembrandt a Rembrandt?\", \"What makes a Van Gogh a Van Gogh?\", \"What makes a Monet a Monet?\", \"What makes a Degas a Degas?\", \"What makes a Cassatt a Cassatt?\", \"What makes a Goya a Goya?\", \"What makes a Bruegel a Bruegel?\", What makes a Leonardo a Leonardo?\", \"What makes a Raphael a Raphael?\", and \"What makes a Picasso a Picasso?\". More of his written works included a series titled \"The Bible in Art\". It contains the following books \"Bible in Art: The Old Testament\" and, \"Bible in Art: The New Testament\". Mühlberger's latest work was called \"Charles Webster Hawthorne: Paintings drawings,and Watercolors\".\n\nWorks\n\nDeath\nRichard Muhlberger passed away in June age 2019, age 81\n\nReferences\n\n1938 births\nWestern New England University faculty\nPeople associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art\nLiving people\nPeople associated with the Worcester Art Museum"
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.